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Thursday, June 28, 2018

Spectacular sunset lightning show in downtown St. Louis - June 28, 2018

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

4K VIDEO: Sunset sky-filling lightning in St. Louis - June 28

Storms continue to overperform in the Midwest, with a barrage of severe weather affecting the St. Louis metro every 12 hours or so this week. The latest in this series was a high pressure ridge-riding severe bow echo that began in central Iowa moving due east, eventually turning south through the metro area. The track/behavior of the storm was similar to the July 2006 derecho, but not as strong. Nonetheless, widespread wind damage and power outages resulted, including at my place in New Baden.

The storms - specifically some new cells that fired on the northwest trailing portion of the bow echo after it had passed through town - put on a top-tier lightning show at sunset in the city. The Gateway Arch was struck by lightning as I sat in my car next to it waiting for the lightning to start. The very first bolt that these second-round storms produced in the city hit the Arch, so I did not capture it on my better cameras. I need a storm to give me some type of warning that it's about to do something like that - like even just one flash of lightning to let me know the potential is there! I don't think it would have mattered - still images weren't really an option yet due to the bright daylight sky, and it was pouring rain. The driver's side dashcam managed to barely get it (the clip is at the end of this video on Youtube):

Once the rain tapered off, the anvil crawler lightning show was top quality. I ran 4K video and the DSLR on this scene. These stills are all single frames, not stacks! I manually reacted to the flashes with 0.6 second exposures to catch these: