St. Louis sunset lightning - June 28, 2018

[Dan Robinson]

The Midwest continues to overperform with multiple ridge-defying MCSs. The latest on Thursday the 28th put on a show of sunset anvil crawlers in downtown St. Louis. The discharges were top-tier sky-fillers, with a couple shots full of lightning channels with no stacking required.



Video:

The Arch was hit by lightning with the first flash the second round of storms produced (no warning), so I continue my streak of missing Arch strikes (which happen once per year on average, I've missed 5 so far and caught only 1). My driver-side dashcam caught a sliver of it, which is included at the end of the video linked above.

Blog post with a few more images:
http://stormhighway.com/blog2018/june2818a.php

 

[Alex Elmore]

Thursday's event was nuts. I'm currently a summer Pathways Student (basically a paid student intern) at the St. Louis NWS and I had to work 13.5 hours that day because of this storm. This is the second event this summer where convection develops over NE/IA in the morning and arcs south/southeast toward the STL area. None of this shows up in the CAMs either, which is helpful (sarcasm). Anyway, I got off work and stepped outside to a beautiful display of mammatus and crawlers. It was great to see so many people across the area also appreciating this gorgeous display. This may have been a down year, but the skies over the St. Louis area have had a decent amount of ominous shelves and stormy sunsets like the one below.