Home | Blog Index | Blog Archives | Christianity & Faith Essays | Storm Chasing Essays

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Storm chasing forecast update 5, for March 30

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.

The unusually-active early spring continues in the Midwest and South at a level I don't recall seeing before in my career. We have a big tornado setup today in the lower Midwest as a shortwave ejects overtop of good low-level moisture and instability, focusing tornado risk from southern Illinois down through western Tennessee. Following that, a system shown for Wednesday is another with very big tornado outbreak potential across the Midwest and South:

GFS 500mb forecast for Wednesday evening, March 30

It feels a little weird skimming over today's decent-looking setup to hype up Wednesday, but the midweek system has all of the hallmarks of a significant tornado outbreak: a powerful trough spreading very fast flow overtop of very good moisture depth, along with an equally-strong low-level jet over the Midwest. Again though, there are many make-or-break details yet to be resolved in models that will be hard to pin down much earlier than the day before or even morning-of. What we can say at this point is that models are in fairly decent agreement on this system closely matching that of historic tornado outbreaks in the past.

As has been the case this entire month, the severe weather risk from both today's and Wednesday's systems will be entirely in the Midwest and South. So far, the Great Plains has been mostly west of all of this activity and therefore the chances of a Plains expedition has been, and will remain, low. Furthermore, beyond this upcoming week, the pattern across the continental US is shown quieting down considerably, and as such, Plains expedition prospects remain low for as far out as can reasonably be determined.

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

2025 Plains Chase Expeditions - Probabilities as of March 30

March 30-April 5

April 5-10