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Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Lightning barrage at Alton, IL with bolts striking Mississippi River locks and bridge - August 6, 2018

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.

4K VIDEO: Lightning barrage at Alton, IL - August 6

A mostly-marginal setup today across the Midwest offered a few areas of transient supercell potential. Down in the St. Louis area, an old outflow south of the metro near Waterloo was my initial target, but the storm in that vicinity could not get going. I ended up north of the city at Alton as a storm briefly went supercellular, albeit above its own outflow at the surface. The storm had some nice midlevel inflow banding curving into the updraft. The big show, however, was the lightning. Strong MLCape (3,000) and a puff of barely-20kt midlevel flow during the late afternoon turned this storm into a crazy CG lightning producer over Alton. Bolts struck both the Clark Bridge and the Melvin Price locks and dam. This was one of the few storms that prompted me to get inside the car for shelter while shooting.

I shot reaction-based stills and video during this event. I caught a couple of bolts on stills, but the video was better. The still frames extracted from this video show the nightmare that is CMOS rolling shutter. The many return strokes that most of these bolts exhibited made the video decent enough though.

A couple of stills: