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.
This is a running-updates post covering chase events during the month of March and April of 2026.
I went to bed Tuesday night not planning to do anything with the weather on Wednesday. The all-day messy thunderstorms in fog and low clouds would likely not offer much worth shooting, so I figured I'd just go outside at home or work to watch any of them that passed nearby. When I awoke at 1PM, a few storms to the southwest were heading into what looked like a not-too-shabby environment along a warm front positioned roughly from Sparta to Pinckneyville. The sun had been poking through down there, and the surface winds were backed nicely along and just north of the boundary. I thought it looked worthy of going a county or so to the south to see what this might do, so I headed down through Venedy to Coulterville to get ahead of the first potential supercell. Alas, a strong outflow was already racing ahead of the storm here, with a few new cells just south of Pinckneyville looking to possibly take over southeast of the outflow.
When I finally got in position on these new storms at Benton, I found the outflow was already 5 miles ahead of them. The only other play was isolated cells to the southeast heading for a river crossing into Kentucky. I'd need to drive almost 2 hours to get into position on these via Harrisburg and the Ohio River bridge at Shawneetown, and it didn't look like I'd make it in time. After a few radar scans of these cells still struggling, it was apparent that effort would not be worth it. I hadn't even planned to drive this far today as it was. I turned around and headed back home to seal the bust, after seeing a few distant lightning strikes but nothing of any photogenic value. No cameras touched this day.
Later that night, continuous thunderstorms traversed the St. Louis metro area for several hours - but all of it was obscured by dense fog. The Arch webcams showed this fog layer was very shallow, maybe 200 feet high, with the tops of taller buildings downtown (and the Arch itself) in clear air above it. I went out once near Shiloh during my lunch break at 8:30PM in the hopes that a stronger cell passing overhead would produce enough wind to mix out the paper-thin fog layer, but that didn't happen.
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From Dan: Please Read
To my regular readers, I offer my apologies for this heavy-handed notice. Unfortunately it has become necessary, so please bear with me!
Please don't copy/upload this site's content to social media or other web sites. Those copies have been a critical problem for me, seriously harming this site and my photography/storm chasing operation by diverting traffic, viewers, engagement and income. "Credit" and "exposure" does not benefit this site or my operation, rather they threaten my ability to cover my operating expenses. Please read my full explanation for this notice here.
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