In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.
Event log for Thursday, May 3: I burned a vacation day Thursday to chase one of Illinois' sleeper setups, one in a string of them this week (Tuesday's setup produced tornadoes up near Champaign). A curving outflow boundary from a previous night's MCS was draped from around Chicago back to the southwest. This boundary had been out in sunlight all day, with strong instability on both sides. As I made it past Springfield on I-55, a small storm was already in progress north of Peoria. I opted not to bite on it for a few reasons. One was that it appeared the storm would approach the boundary at too steep of an angle, crossing it before it could produce. I was too far away to catch it crossing and possibly producing at that brief moment, so I opted to let it go and hope that something would fire farther southwest. I slowly made my way west out of Lincoln to Mason City. After waiting for almost 90 minutes, it became obvious that nothing was going to go before sunset. The storm north of Peoria looked good for a few radar scans, but it seemed to have trouble keeping its act together. With darkness falling and nothing promising within several hours' intercept range, I called it a bust and went home. It would have been a classic 'blue sky' bust, except for the fact that I could see the lightning from the storm to the north.
Plains trip forecast update: The western trough/upper low setups that were showing on models for the Plains a few days ago has, not surprisingly, fallen apart. The trough is still there, but shown much farther south and weaker than it was before. Any tornado chances seem to be confined to the south Texas area where some decent upper flow will overspread deep moisture. The rest of the Plains will either be quiet or have some needle-in-a-haystack opportunities in a weaker flow or zonal flow regime, with possibly some difficult-to-forecast upper impulses here and there to enhance tornado chances (but not by much).
At any rate, this isn't looking like a pattern I want to spend the money on for a Plains trip. So, unless some major turnaround happens in model data in the next couple of days (highly unlikely), this one's a no-go. At the far end of the range, nothing of interest is hinted at by either long-range model through the end of next week. However, plenty of Midwestern 'sleeper' days may be thrown in the mix. Those are difficult for me to chase due to the short notice I have for taking days off, but occasionally I'll be able to make it out.
The following table plots the chance of a Plains storm chase expedition happening
in a particular date range (Midwestern storm chase days are not factored into this table):
2012 Plains Storm Expeditions - Probabilities as of May 3
Web Site Design and Internet Marketing by CIS Internet
From Dan: Please Read
To my regular readers, I offer my apologies for this heavy-handed notice. Unfortunately it has become necessary, so please bear with me!
Please don't copy/upload this site's content to social media or other web sites. Those copies have been a critical problem for me, seriously harming this site and my photography/storm chasing operation by diverting traffic, viewers, engagement and income. "Credit" and "exposure" does not benefit this site or my operation, rather they threaten my ability to cover my operating expenses. Please read my full explanation for this notice here.
Before continuing, check each box to agree to and acknowledge these two statements:
Click this button to finalize this acknowledgement:
