SkyPix

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

Oncoming HP Load

By

Heavy-precipitation (HP) supercells can take many forms (most of them rather menacing in appearance):  behind big arcus clouds, drum-shaped, deep and dense with great structure, spiraling in form with wrapping tail and wall clouds, with an embedded little tornado visible, with an embedded big tornado visible, with a tornado playing hide and seek and sometimes a peek, pastel-festooned in the sunset … [Read more...]

No Grace for Gracemont

By

Here was a peculiar combination of a truly hybrid shelf and wall cloud that couldn't decide which it wanted to be.  A tremendous precipitation surge had descended through the back side of the supercell, then started to wrap through the southwest side of the low-level mesocyclone, accelerating the storm but not completely undercutting the original low-level circulation, whose cloud material still … [Read more...]

Dumont Dust Tube

By

The "Dumont" tornado seldom, if ever, had a condensation funnel, but it lasted ten minutes while gradually lofting dust toward the rotating, scuddy cloud base above.  I was unsurprised and glad to learn that this vortex produced no known damage, in a sparsely populated area of large ranches and few structures.  Despite dozens of chases and even more supercells seen in these parts, the vast area … [Read more...]

Prairie Fire Response

By

After midday dryline passage, a fire began a couple miles to the south-southwest, its embers blowing into a swath of dry, tall grass from the previous growing season.  Fires in the southern Great Plains can race out to tens or hundreds of thousands of acres within just a few hours under such dry and windy circumstances, in a severe drought, with crispy fine fuels.  Fortunately, two factors saved … [Read more...]

Twisted Blasts in the Blue Hour

By

After the "slender sunset supercell" tattooed itself onto my memory for life, the storm very slowly weakened into the deepening twilight blue, while another developed on its outflow boundary to the west.  Nonetheless, when it came to generating electricity, the little storm that could, most certainly did.  I lost count of how much lightning it flung every which way from its middle to upper … [Read more...]

Cloud with No Name

By

Convectively caused but not convectively structured, laminar yet not entirely lenticular, detached yet dependent, this layered cloud band reminded me a great deal of a tail cloud, but wasn't.  Later, it would become part of a tail feature connected the supercell here unseen at left (a storm definitely subject to attention and amazement!).  This feature's structure and basic formative process on … [Read more...]