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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. |
As a catch-up: I officially shut down my professional storm chasing operation after a final "revenue" chase on September 21. The out-of-control copyright infringement issue had diverted enough of my income that I no longer had the necessary operating funds to continue chasing in a professional capacity. By mid-October, the scale of the infringement problem continued to expand. Some of my most popular images were being posted to Reddit, which has been happening for a long time - but now Google is giving them the top search result for keywords on those events, while this site's link was nowhere to be found in results. As a reponse, I took this site completely offline - fully intending for that to be permanent unless I could figure out a solution.
Since then, I've been working on videos about the copyright infringement problem, publishing the first about Fair Use. In addition, I've finished development on code that will prompt every viewer of the site with the dialog you saw when you arrived here. I know most of my readers don't need to see that, so I apologize. The few who do respost my work on social media have just made it necessary. I am hoping that will be enough to stem the tide of the migration of my life's work to social media, enough that I'm bringing this site back online on a trial basis to evaluate how effective that is.
Operationally, as I said on the copyright infringement page, I'm back to being mostly a hobbyist chaser. What does that mean, exactly? It means mostly local chasing of lightning, tornadoes and other things I like from now on, and not much of the subjects I'm don't: flooding and winter weather expeditions, to name a few. I still see winter weather coverage as having some public awareness benefit, so I'll likely go out a few times for big events in the STL metro. Some funding for limited out-of-area winter weather trips may be coming, pending the outcome of several copyright cases involving my footage. I just don't have the ability to take 2 months off to cover winter weather from Omaha, Nebraska to Texas to Florida like I'd been doing.
With that out of the way, on to the weather. The past two months have been mostly quiet, with a couple of nice events in middle November. Here's a recap:
October-November 2025 Event List
October 2: Sunset cumulonimbus over Lebanon, Illinois
This short-lived storm popped up at sunset, providing a nice show of colors as it passed between O'Fallon and Lebanon, Illinois. I took my lunch break from work to shoot these:
November 11: Major aurora event over Germantown, Illinois
Had I known this event was going to be so huge, I would have gone back to the Arch despite its bright LED floodlights being on. I instead set up for this at my usual rural railroad crossing astrophotography spot (we don't have any cool classic barns/windmills/etc in open areas nearby). I shot a timelapse through the first couple of big substorms, a few of which actually overexposed due to how intense the red pillars were! This is a stack of two exposures, as the crossing lights have to be shot at a small aperture:
This is a single exposure over New Baden:
The timelapse didn't turn out too bad, but I didn't think it was on par to deserve its own Youtube upload. It will likely make an appearance as b-roll in a future video.
November 12: Aurora over New Baden, IL
I was working this night, and wasn't able to stay out and shoot this second CME. I grabbed this phone shot on my lunch break during one of the better substorms:
November 17: St. Louis metro lightning
The first local lightning opportunity in nearly two months turned out to be a nice one, though the better bolts avoided the St. Louis skyline. The lightning was high-based and very photogenic. The last 3 shots are the departing storms viewed from New Baden:
November 18: Southern Illinois storm bust
The look of this fall season tornado setup gradually diminished in the 48 hours leading up to it, going from a no-brainer local setup to a "meh" one down in the Sikeston-Paducah corridor the morning of. Had it not been for the cumulus field bubbling up over St. Louis, I might not have even put my gear into the car. I decided to go out and stay with this area as it finally developed into a few weak rain showers between Okawville and Nashville. These never took root as they raced away to the east. One more cell down near Sparta was within reach, but appeared to be headed for a similar fate. With no lightning and sunset approaching, I decided it wasn't worth the extra mileage away from home. I got back just after the end of civil twilight, glad I wasn't calling the chase south of Paducah, Kentucky at that moment like I'd been if I'd gone down there.
November 29: St. Louis thundersnow
I went out for a couple of hours for the peak of the snowstorm in the metro area on Saturday morning. I witnessed a single instance of thundersnow at 6:00am in Sunset Hills:
I know I'm going to get this question, so I'll just repeat the same answer here as I've already done at the beginning of this page. I'm a chaser because I'm interested in weather, and I'm always going to go out when I can to observe big events. If this had ben a "pro" winter storm chase, I would have taken a day and a half off of work and spent my entire Saturday shooting (my average "revenue" winter storm shoot was 12-16 hours). Instead, I headed out for a couple of hours during the peak of this storm, then went into work on my normal schedule. I'm going to be doing that as long as I can, Lord willing.
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