May-June 2026 Storm Chasing Recap

Finally glad to be off of a 2-week interval of midnight shifts, my return to normal was welcomed by these storms moving through the northern St. Louis metro area after dark. I didn't think these would be worth driving far for, so I decided to shoot them with the 50mm lens from town at whatever distance they ended up being. The storms were high-based and the lightning very photogenic and visible for great distances. The flashes featured extensive vivid negative leader trees below cloud base.

This distant cell, 62 miles away just west of Effingham, showed the structure of the lightning flashes with these storms. The positive end of the bidirectional leader tree was inside of the cumulonimbus tower, with the negative end poking down below the cloud bases.

A second round of storms developed just south of I-72 and slowly dropped southeast. Lightning was not as photogenic with this round, but there was some interesting structure with striations along the outflow:

Another low-expectations day produces several good captures! Models had indicated that evening supercells were a possibility in the metro area on the remnant outflow from the previous night's storms. Instead, storms developed much earlier at noon, mostly dashing those chances.

The initial line of storms did not look like anything high-quality. But they were already sending mammatus undulatus to the east overhead, a rare cloud type I'd not observed before:

As these storms approached, I decided to just go outside of town to see what the lightning looked like. It was suprisingly good, with many complex intracloud/cloud-to-ground discharges of both polarities with extensive leaders below cloud base. I captured a couple of really nice 6,000fps sequences at St. Morgan. One of these flashes had not one, but *three* examples of the initiation of a bidirectional leader - the birth of a lightning flash:

Stronger storms were developing to the southwest and heading in this direction. I positioned south of New Baden to watch these approach as they coalesced into a supercell south of Mascoutah, apparently riding the old outflow from last night. A rear-flank downdraft developed and began wrapping around a weak high-based mesocyclone, never a real threat for a tornado but certainly more than I'd expected to see this early in the day. A heavy precip core continually developed in the forward flank, with multiple dense blobs descending on the south side. I stayed ahead of this to Addieville, stopping a few times to attempt lightning shots.

The supercell slowly lost its punch after passing Okawville, and a trailing cell near St. Libory was trying to take over. Despite some good lightning for an interval, this storm too eventually faded as it approached Lively Grove.

The midday storms cleared out early enough in the afternoon. This allowed a period of sun to recover some instability for the originally-expected round of St. Louis metro supercells in the evening. A new storm went up near Godfrey and slowly intensified, and I made the easy jump up to Alhambra to get ahead of it. After a few cycles, the storm began a rapid intensification just before crossing I-55 at Livingston. The core expanded south and overtook me as a barrage of negative CG lightning started. I captured two nice 6,000fps shots here (these are included with the other shots from easlier in the day int he Youtube video linked above).

As the precip arrived, a multiple-ground-connection bolt hit in the field just to my east, the rolling shutter of the dashcam only captured part of the first return stroke:

After this burst of lightning ended, I moved east just behind the storm to Greenville, where large-looking hail was visible dotting the grass. As I pulled over to investigate, a single stone probably in the 2-inch range slammed loudly into my windshield with enough force to break it - but the glass thankfully remained intact.

Most of the hail was in the one-inch diameter range, but I found several 1.75" stones in downtown Greenville (reporting this to the NWS):

This log is on the 2026 Great Plains logs page.

This log is on the 2026 Great Plains logs page.

Model depictions of storms this night did not inspire confidence that they'd offer much worth shooting. A few cells fired far to the south before midnight, but weren't producing many bolts. After I got home from work at 1AM, more towering cumulus was going up along the remnant outflow from the previous day that had advanced northeastward to right overhead. Storms soon fired on this boundary across the metro area. At around 3AM, these underwent a rapid intensification and began producing bursts of nice lightning in mosty random locations. Due to the transient and random nature of these, I decided to not chase anything and just shoot anything that happened to go up near town.

This cell near Scott AFB pulsed and produced a flurry of bolts, shot from New Baden:

Storms soon filled in along the entire boundary from Troy, Missouri down through Chester, Illinois. Many of the more isolated cells were producing intense, repeating bolts-from-the-blue from a common initiating point in the cells' vault regions. Most bolts were going straight down through the vault, but a few would arc out way ahead of the updrafts. This flash did both:

I framed for a high-speed shot of this cell, which produced a bolt in frame for a very nice 6,002 fps capture of the bright negative leader tree descending (indicating the return stroke would have a high peak current):