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Saturday, September 24, 2016

September 16 funnel and supercells in southern Illinois

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.

Like many Midwest storm chase days, this one was a "sleeper" in which the potential does not become evident until the last minute. Models had been showing "squall line" and I was not expecting to chase at all this day, aside from possible lightning photography at home after dark. By mid-afternoon, I realized that new storms north of Cape Girardeau, MO were staying discrete, and surface obs showed backed surface winds across southern IL. The radar had the 'look' of I-better-get-down-there, so I rushed out the door heading south.

I only had about 40 miles to get to the first storm, which I caught near Baldwin, Illinois (west of Sparta). Radar showed a strong couplet, but I could not get a visual on the base for quite some time due to the heavy forests along the Kaskaskia River basin. As the storm approached, I finally got a good visual on a nice HP notch and several suspicious lowerings back in the rain. Winds, however, were flowing westward out of the storm, and no apparent surface inflow was making its way into the notch. Another supercell was beginning to develop to the southwest, with its forward flank precip enveloping the inflow region of the Baldwin storm. Right about the time the I-55 tornado report came in from Missouri, I decided to drop south 15 miles to the new storm.

The new storm cycled several times with pronounced RFD cuts, but as with the first storm, it was all undercut with outflow from the north and northwest. Eventually, a third meso began taking shape down near Chester, so I again dropped south to check it out. Even before I got a visual of the area of interest, I could see a giant whale's mouth formation way out ahead of everything as well as strong northwesterly winds, indicating the tornado-warned part of the storm likely had no chance.

Nonetheless, I stayed ahead of the gust front for another 20 minutes just to give it a chance for some inflow to carve back in. Not surprisingly, this didn't happen.. However, a short-lived updraft ahead of the outflow managed to spin up a nice funnel near Campbell Hill, which lasted for about 5 minutes before being obliterated by the gust front.