SkyPix

A digital photographic storybook of clouds, weather and water by Roger Edwards.

Toppled, Crumpled Power Tower

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We examined this intense damage from a high-end severe thunderstorm before, as another, far weaker one spread an anvil across the sky from off-screen right to left.  This high-tension power-line tower oonce helped to transport electricity from the wind farm in the distant left background.   Instead, just over a week earlier, a bowing thunderstorm cluster with two separate 131-mph gust measurements … [Read more...]

Abstract Reality

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Cloud windows are some of my favorite photography targets, whether near sunset or before, from ground or air, colorful or somber in hue.  Being fluid, every one is as unique as its combination of place and time, never to be precisely duplicated.  This one, just post-sunset, was so brilliantly cast against a dark foreground that in a deep zoom,  it assumed the form of an abstract painting, yet was … [Read more...]

Wind Farm Wind Destruction

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This sort of ironic and high-end damage to multiple wind turbines suggests tornadic cause; however, this instead was the result of an extremely severe thunderstorm cluster eight days earlier.  Downdrafts reached 131 mph at two different weather stations in the area:  a personal Ambient model and a South Dakota Mesonet site.  With the turbines mechanically braked to avoid burning up the innards … [Read more...]

Sunlit Tornadic Finale through Rain

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The long-lived Wellfleet tornado became secluded in the final couple minutes of its lifespan, and would not last more than a minute or so after this.  With the parent supercell right-moving slowly toward the SSE, the forward-flank core gradually was covering more of my position, after being on its edge for some time.  Fortunately the sporadic hail stayed subsevere to marginally severe here, and I … [Read more...]

Flash into Desert Dust

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One among numerous spectacular cloud-to-ground flashes, on a magical night between Tucson and Phoenix, blasted some patch of desert nearby in two places, thanks to a split contact channel.  The bottom of the brightest channel was windblown enough to see slight displacement for its flashes as well; one can tell it wasn't camera shake by the lack of similar horizontal displacement of any other forks … [Read more...]

Roamin’ into Rome

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After the mid-afternoon end of a conference in Atlanta, I roamed into Rome to position for a couple days of exploring, rock hunting, hiking, and waterfall hunting in the nearby southern Appalachians, before heading back home.  What I didn't expect was a couple of really nice sunsets from open vantages, the first being here in an otherwise thickly forested and/or heavily developed lowland area of … [Read more...]