Storm Highway by Dan Robinson
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                   Sunday, July 9, 2012 - 4:08PM CDT

July 8 St. Louis storms and flooding

By DAN ROBINSON
Editor/Photographer
Important Message 30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography Dan's YouTube Video Channel Dan's Twitter feed Dan's RSS/XML feed

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and brought down my business.

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. This page is a detailed account of the biggest threat to my photography and video operation that I had to battle daily to just barely survive, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem facing all of my colleagues as well.

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: Storms and flooding in St. Louis

Colliding strong outflow boundaries (one from the west, another from the east) triggered a cluster of severe storms directly over St. Louis on Sunday evening, which barely moved for almost 2 hours. The result was some minor flooding, mainly in the southern neighborhoods. Other than some dramatic clouds over downtown, there wasn't much in the way of photographic opportunities. A section of Lindbergh Boulevard was covered with about 6-7 inches of water from the heavy rains.

Around 8PM, multiple gust fronts moved over downtown from different cells. One of them developed a "shark's tooth" which, to the untrained eye, might have appeared deceptively like a tornado/funnel. The key was that it wasn't rotating or moving much at all - the harmless cloud material simply condensed slowly downward toward the ground. I have seen gust fronts/shelf clouds in West Virginia do this many times, 'scraping' the tops of ridges.

I tried for a tower lightning hit off of Lindbergh - though I didn't get that, a well-placed CG was good enough:

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