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Monday, June 25, 2018

Supercells in the St. Louis metro - June 25, 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.

A warm front draped northwest to southest through the heart of the St. Louis metro area, strong instability and an upper-level jet made Monday a potentially big storm chase day for the region. I started with this weak storm at Red Bud that, despite looking paltry on radar, still maintained a respectable updraft base with strong rising motion, RFD clear slot and partial wall cloud:

This storm had all the looks of producing if it could just gain a few notches in intensity, which I expected could happen once the low level jet started picking up near sunset. However, I noted a second storm firing in the St. Louis city limits that would be threatening downtown - so despite the good look of the Red Bud storm, I rushed to get back into the city so as to not miss something potentially photogenic over the skyline.

After fighting rush-hour traffic gridlock, I arrived at the updraft of the St. Louis storm at I-64 and I-170 at Brentwood. Strong descending motion indicated a solid RFD trying to cut in, but the updraft itself was struggling. Furthermore, a new storm at Arnold was cutting off its low-level inflow. This was the view at Big Bend and Manchester:

I went downtown to see if the sun could peek through for a rainbow or other sunset colors, which didn't happen. The southern storm, now at Columbia, was flickering with lightning to the south, but not visible enough to capture with "reaction based" stills. Here is the view of the back edge and anvil of the Columbia storm with the Arch: