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Friday, January 12, 2018

Light pillars on January 11; January 12 winter storm; Hannibal freezing rain trip on January 9

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.

I covered winter westher in Southern Illinois on Thursday and Friday (January 11 and 12) Ina, Illinois back into the St. Louis area. On the 11th, I witnessed a rare atmospheric optics phenomenon developed over much of the area during the event. Light pillars are typically observed during extreme cold (near or below zero Fahrenheit) as tiny ice crystals hovering in the air near the surface reflect light from ground-level sources like streetlights. They appear very much like pillars seen during displays of aurora borealis, but their light source is terrestrial. What made this event unusual is that surface temperatures were in the upper teens to low 20s, and sleet was the precipitation type falling at the time. Sleet pellets are generally incapable of creating these type of optics themselves, so it is likely that the sleet was co-mingled with small ice crystals of another shape and size.

The pillars were visible over much of the St. Louis Metro East. This was the view at O'Fallon:

As I moved east on I-64 to stay with the falling precipitation, the pillars were visible over most towns in southern Illinois, most notably in Nashville: