SkyPix

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

Cloud-Base Fire Glow

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The glow of a grass and cedar fire reflects off the cloud base in the late moments of twilight, as smoke ascends into a nascent thunderstorm's updraft region.  Lightning strikes from a developing squall line set several big wildfires in a virtual tinderbox cured by micro-drought in northern Oklahoma.  The area had gone several weeks with scant rainfall—despite rains to the north and … [Read more...]

Sunny Subzero Streamers

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Ordinary in the northern Plains or upper Midwest, a scene like this, with snow streamers zipping across the road on a sunny, subzero morning, is extraordinarily rare in central Oklahoma.  The snow peeled off the crest of dune-like drifts on the north (left) side of the road and dispersed into the grass and woods on the south side.   This was not comfortable.  I was wishing to be in a much-warmer … [Read more...]

Cumulus Humilis, Everglades

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Benign but mildly sheared cumulus humilis clouds drift placidly over the Everglades—Florida's little estuarine version of the Great Plains.  While living in Miami, I made many short trips westward into the River of Grass, finding a large element of the same solace and immersion in the spaciousness of sky as I would during springtime sojourns to the High Plains.  It became a sort of home away from … [Read more...]

Stages of Lakeshore Ice

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Icicles of lake water, in various stages of growth, line up under a tilted shoreline log.  The lower the log, the more thoroughly the waves splashed it before the lake froze, and the thicker the icicles and columns.  The wave action also stirred up the muddy bottom as it washed against the log, coloring the water reddish from the embedded sediment, but brought up only a small amount of fine clay … [Read more...]

Wall Cloud at Sunset

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This still ranks as the most stunning, brilliantly lit sunset wall cloud I've seen.  Every bit of these colors on the Provia slide blazed into our eyeballs, and still more in the surrounding sky.  No scan, no slide, no video can do justice to the richness of the scene that the sky gave us for just a few minutes, one stormy May day outside Childress.  A mesocyclone formed along the intersection of … [Read more...]

Ice Polygons

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Polygonal ice formed on a very shallow (a few inches to a couple feet), relatively calm part of a Lake Thunderbird cove, as air temperatures slowly but relentlessly fell to below zero degrees F.  This appears to be a hybrid of processes that form round "pancake ice" on open water, and "ice-wedge polygons" atop frozen landscapes with high water content.  Clearly, chunks of ice that were not round … [Read more...]