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Sunday, August 1, 2021

Second half of July 2021 storm chasing roundup

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.

Here's a short blog post covering a couple of local events during the second half of July 2021.

July 25: Daybreak storms in the STL metro

Models had been insistent on overnight storms to our north dissipating well before reaching the I-70 corridor at daybreak Sunday. Instead, the storms defied expectations and persisted all the way through the St. Louis metro area. Lightning activity was above-average, but mostly embedded deep in the heavy rain cores of these slow-moving storms. These two captures were just north of Trenton, IL in the morning twilight.

July 29: Overnight storms in the STL Metro-East

Once again, storms overperform from model expectations. Lightning-active cells fired just south of the I-72 corridor before sunset, and maintained intensity through the St. Louis metro after midnight. I started northwest of Greenfield, IL as new storms produced bolts-from-the-blue, but trees, hills and tall corn prevented me from finding a clear view before this activity ceased. I dropped south to Edwardsville to await storms across the river to the west after dark. A briefly-supercellular updraft went up ahead of this activity at Alton, producing lots of high-altitude intracloud discharges above some interesting low-level structure.

I moved back home to New Baden to shoot a part of the complex where convection and CG lightning activity was more frequent. Aside from a few uncooperative rougue bolts-from-the-blue ahead of the line, the front part of the storms offered little of photogenic value. So, I decided to go home, let the storms pass overhead and hope for better visible lightning on their back side. While this happened, two very close strikes hit within a tenth of a mile, the second one knocking out power to the neighborhood. My dashcams captured these:

As usual, the lightning on the back side/stratiform precip region of the storms was better and more cooperative. I captured a few good bolts on stills and on 6,000 FPS high-speed video less than a half mile from home.