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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

April 10 chase log; Plains forecast update for April 11

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.

Despite unidirectional wind profiles, speed shear thanks to a 60-knot midlevel jet overhead coupled with modest instability and a cold front to initiate storms meant it was at least a marginal severe weather storm chase day in the St. Louis metro on Monday evening. After several left-split-dominant clusters of storms struggled during the evening, a few supercells finally evolved at sunset. I grabbed one of these just south of home at Venedy, IL where the RFD gust front pushed a rounded base outward with a nice show of frequent lightning.

A descending blob of precip produced a tornado look-alike in about the right spot for one:

I encountered a few downpours of dime-sized hail, but otherwise didn't come away with any "keeper" imagery. It was nice to have only a 25-minute drive home after a chase.

Plains forecast update for April 11

The Plains system I had been watching for next weekend and beyond has - not unexpectedly - vanished completely from model-land. A few marginal (weak instability) setups on the dryline appear possible over the coming 10 days, but certainly not anything I feel will be worthy of spending spring chase funds (and vacation days) on for a trip. With nothing of interest showing up on medium-to-long range models either, I'm fairly confident in no storm chase expeditions happening for at least the next 10 days.

The following table charts the probabilities for a Plains storm chase expedition taking place for the date ranges shown:

2017 Plains Storm Expeditions - Probabilities as of April 11

April 12-16

April 17-21

10%