SkyPix

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

Belmont Tornadic Supercell

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This dense, heavy-precip (HP) supercell, embedded in a broken but solidifying line of storms, was tornadic.  That's not a curved rain shaft at lower middle, to the left of the wall cloud. It's a tornado from an old, deeply occluded and rain-wrapped mesocyclone.  Continuity of observing this storm affirmed this much better than a single-time sample would, such as either this photo, or what you … [Read more...]

Sticky Stacks

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A heavy, west, sticky snowfall, coating the north faces of many well-exposed tree trunks, piled up on thin twigs and small branches.  This happened despite the presence of 15-25-mph north winds through much of the event, which normally would both shake and directly blow the snow off.  The limbs shook, but the snow stuck.  This snow was so moist and dense that it fell in large aggregates, and had … [Read more...]

Sunset 99

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This was somewhere between the 99th sunset I had admired (long ago as a kid) and the 99th I had photographed (not keeping count, but probably sometime in the 2000s).  But it was the first photogenic sunset of 1999, as seen from the roof of the former NSSL/SPC facility on the OU North Campus.   Scuddy fractocumulus rags wafted southward in the cool outflow, produced by the same area of convection … [Read more...]

Slicing the Sunrise Sky

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A serendipitously symmetric sunrise scene serenaded sight and soul, on this crisp central Oklahoma morning.  Thin, high cirrus and a couple contrails brightly reflected higher light, while altostratus chunks brought warmer-toned hues from lower elevations where the rays had to penetrate more atmosphere.    This was yet another among a growing collection of single-location views from the last … [Read more...]

One-and-Done Cone

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“Cones” of this sort crisscross Kansas often in most springs.  That included the year of this slide.  The parent supercell formed in a narrow sliver of favorable instability and shear tucked between a dryline, warm front and outflow area, lasted just long enough to produce this tornado in the warm-frontal zone, then…poof, gone:  tornado and supercell alike.  Had there been a dual-polarization … [Read more...]

Ice Machine: Let It Go

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The beauty of the wildflower-carpeted rolling Great Plains belied the violence of the messy supercell crossing the distance from right to left, at high velocity.  This post-cold-frontal storm moved from north-central Wyoming into southwestern South Dakota and increasing moisture, aiding and abetting a fast-moving, outflow surfing, rotating hail machine, with severe gusts to boot.  The front-flank … [Read more...]