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Sunday, January 13, 2013 - 4:00AM CST

January 12 thunderstorms and light icing event

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

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.

CCTV CLIP: Lightning in New Baden, IL, January 13

Quite a busy afternoon/evening yesterday and into the overnight hours! Thanks to diligent road crews salting the bridges around St. Louis, I did not find any icing problems during yesterday's freezing rain event in the metro area. Alton picked up a good glaze of ice by the time the event was over (click image for a full-screen high-res version):

As the freezing rain was knocking on the door on the western side of the metro, thunderstorms were in progress farther east. While the heaviest cores stayed well to the east toward I-57, I observed a few flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder here at home in the trailing stratiform precip. I briefly headed east intending to try and grab some lightning stills, but turned around when I realized the 32°F line was moving into the metro area much faster than I'd expected.

I pulled some video off of my CCTV system to save the lightning for posterity (linked above), and show that we did indeed get our first thunderstorm of the year. Though I didn't continue the 'stills streak' from last year, it does continue the streak of at least *seeing* lightning every month since January of 2012, and is now the third consecutive winter season in the Midwest that I've experienced at least one thunderstorm.