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September Illinois lightning
HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: IL Lightning on 9/2
I started today's chase by heading up to Springfield - half to chase moving over the city, and half to get a jump on the possible drive to Chicago for storms later on. I set up for a capitol/lightning shot (below left, no real success there), then went over to the tall TV towers east of town along I-72. No upward flashes occured to the large towers, but a downward CG hit a smaller tower in the distance (below right).
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The storms moving through Springfield did not develop trailing stratiform precip regions, despite having several hours to mature - and so there was no upward lightning at the towers east of town. For this reason, I chose not to complete the Chicago trip, as the environment up there would likely support similar storm evolution (not to mention storms appeared generally weaker farther north). Heading back south, I had to punch through 20 miles of blinding rain and intense lightning on I-55 south of Springfield. I saw several close strikes along the highway, including one with a fire-orange glow at the ground where it met a corn field about 200 yards off the road. There was no practical or safe way to record or capture these scenes while driving in the low visibilities, so I didn't try.
As I neared home after dark, storms near St. Louis were generally weakening, but some areas of stratiform precip developed and stayed electrified enough for some nighttime lightning photography. After arriving home, I went back out around New Baden at various locations to set up the cameras. Quite a bit of intracloud flashes here - not full "anvil crawlers", but bursts of relatively small but intricate localized discharges. All this time, a stronger cell to the distant southeast provided some cloud-to-ground bolts, colored orange due to the 30-40 miles of atmosphere they were viewed through.
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The video shows one of the intracloud discharge sequences triggering upward flashes off of towers far in the distance in Missouri, south of St. Louis. Here is a frame grab from the video:
September 1 storm - New Baden, IL
Cloud cover most of the day on Wednesday limited instability generally north of the Ohio River. The result was a northward-moving complex of storms dissipating as it approached I-64 east of St. Louis. This arcus/shelf cloud marked the outflow boundary as it passed over New Baden. As the sun went down, a few flashes of lightning were visible in the storm remnants near Mount Vernon - but nothing else photogenic showed itself.
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