Tuesday the 9th brought yet another barrage of close lightning over downtown St. Louis, but no strikes to the Arch. There was one hit at the west end of the Eads Bridge (or possibly to one of the buildings at Laclede's Landing) very close to where I was shooting video, with instantaneous thunder. I had the camera set up on my typical close framing of the Arch, so didn't capture it. This was the only lightning image I captured from this event - the bolt is passing behind the Arch here (not hitting it):
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That image, by the way, is courtesy of my old video camera. I was finally able to get it working after having the necessary part overnight-shipped (in case you were wondering after the last chase account).
Wednesday brought the 'main event' as the cold front finally swept through. The pre-frontal environment was slightly conducive for supercells. A few storms north of the metro area in Illinois briefly attained minimal supercell structures. These phases were very transient and too short-lived to purposely intercept, but I managed to be at the right place at the right time to capture one such interval near Hamel. This outflowish storm rapidly transitioned with a quickly-lowering updraft base, strong inflow and rapidly rising scud tags into a developing wall cloud. The storm displayed a hook structure on radar at this time.
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As with the others, this phase was short-lived - the storm went back to being completely outflow-dominant after only 5 minutes. I then left this scene to get back downtown for the final round of storms on the cold front. These were generally weak and disorganized as they passed over the city:
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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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This chase was a routine television assignment in my role as a cameraman. As a result, many of these don't have a dedicated chase log.
This chase was only recorded in my mileage reports, no detailed log was written for it.
