SkyPix

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

Electrified Twilight Sky

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An older, large supercell that was growing upscale into a bow echo absorbed a newer, broad-based, rapidly organizing supercell that formed on a horizontal roll in the original storm's inflow region.  The result was intense and complex, as one would expect:  a county-scale, rotating thunderstorm cluster, with a central mesocyclone over 20 miles wide, offering large hail, very severe wind, and flash … [Read more...]

South Dakota Dust Plume

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Bailing south out of the back side of a severe thunderstorm complex, I had to stop briefly to let pass an extraordinarily dense plume of dust that outflow scoured off plowed fields.  What first seemed an annoying inconvenience became one of my favorite, most evocative storm-chasing images of the season, as the deeply shadowed dust nearly (but not completely) obscured a lone tree on the open South … [Read more...]

Elevated Supercell Sparking

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A long chase day, that started in midafternoon over southern Montana, ended near the northeast rim of the South Dakota Badlands in twilight, after I bailed off a growing, rotating cluster of severe storms that evolved from merged supercells.  While preparing to shoot lightning eastward into the back of that cluster, I noticed a small, discrete, elevated supercell to the northwest, also throwing … [Read more...]

Layered Illumination

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Sitting in my motel room at 11 p.m., getting horizontal and unwinding after a Colorado chase day, I noticed faint flashes out the window, and on radar, an intensifying, lengthening band of elevated thunderstorms to the west, moving mostly eastward.  That reinvigorated me for a short trip down the Interstate to meet them.  The richly complicated cloud layers over the gust front made a wonderful … [Read more...]

Weak, Scuddy Spinup

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For less than a minute, under the broader, flatter wall cloud, this persistent, scuddy, rotating lowering yielded rising, modestly rotating tendrils of scud that coiled up from the surface.  Moistened considerably by at least two storms' cores (this one and another to the north-northeast), as well as rain the previous day, the weakly tornadic circulation couldn't raise dust.  Nonetheless, with a … [Read more...]

More Blue-Hour Blasts

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As if it weren't enough for this slowly dying supercell to fling one magnificent barrage of electricity out into all directions of the twilight sky (including miles of clear air nearly to overhead), it did so again!  Meanwhile, that Okie pumpjack just kept on bobbing in the short, wide-angle time exposure until the lightning flashed and I closed the shutter.  This storm, and the one that … [Read more...]