SkyPix

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

Frontal Arcus, Part 1

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[Part 1 of 2] On a humid late-autumn morning, a seemingly ordinary cold front made quite the spectacle of itself!  This was one of the most impressive non-thunderstorm shelf clouds I’ve seen:  front-lit by a southeastern sun, set beneath wispy cirrus, and above a rolling landscape of semi-rural acreage carpeted by the autumnal fawn and dun of dormant grass.  Surface heating and vertical mixing … [Read more...]

Crater from Giant Hail

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This is what a 4+ inch hailstone does to the windshield of a Ford Crown Victoria.  Quite the impressive crater, no?  This was not our desired outcome.  Give the predicament, however, it was a known risk.  The evening before, south of I-40 on a northbound eastern Panhandle road, we found ourselves triangulated in the twilight between a tornado to the immediate southwest, another tornado a few miles … [Read more...]

Dying Twilight Tornado in Rain

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After several years of ignoring it due to the low-light noisiness of my first DSLR, I finally decided to post this image and its story.  The parent HP supercell had put on a nice structural show for us in the Oklahoma Panhandle, before becoming even more deeply rain-wrapped as it eased east-southeastward into deepening twilight.  We honestly did not expect to dig out a tornado after it looked so … [Read more...]

Autumnal Okie Sundown

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These famously colorful central Oklahoma sunsets are a marvel to behold year-round.  Still, the long-lasting ones of late fall seem to be the most deeply immersive for the observer, when the sun sets at a steep angle and colors linger long enough for cloud forms to evolve noticeably through the tonal progression.  Even for a sunset here, this peak-phase show was exceptionally brilliant and fluidly … [Read more...]

Midlevel Sunrise Lenticulars

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Sunrise over the Kiamichi Valley brought a nice little surprise in the form of a middle-level standing-wave cloud, a ragged lenticular formation downwind from the Kiamichi Mountains (a range in the Ouachitas).   Normally the terrain here, with rises "only" around 1000–1500 feet above the valley floors, would not provide enough lift in standing waves above the boundary layer to support such … [Read more...]

Contrails Crisscrossing

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Flights over "Flyover Country" spread contrails commonly, and we residents of the Plains States are quite accustomed to skies like this when few other clouds festoon the wild blue.  When humidity in the upper troposphere is high enough, but not saturated, condensed water droplets natively present in cooling jet exhaust freeze quickly to crystals, and can linger for many minutes and linear miles … [Read more...]