SkyPix

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

Downburst and Classic Cars

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A more classical microburst is hard to find, with toroidal curling of rain feet.  A more classic pair of cars is hard to find too, with these old Mercurys long past their shelf life and facing the eastern Arizona sky.  I was hoping for cloud-to-ground lightning with this storm, given such an unusual foreground, but got none.  Fortunately, a later one in the chain of cells obliged! Benson AZ (12 … [Read more...]

Supercell Seedling

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Already sprouting a small tail cloud and growing a robust updraft base, this very young and increasingly electrified storm emerged from a large mass of mostly midlevel, midafternoon convection dropping virga and light rain, as I've seen several times with late-developing Colorado supercells.    Lightning activity grew markedly in this stage—not surprising considering this newfound updraft thrust … [Read more...]

Sunset Twist

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This amazing sunset scene was a story of perseverance amidst deep disappointment.  Believe it or not, I had to force myself to appreciate it.  While my two-vehicle caravan was busting, watching towers fizzle on a boundary 90 miles to the south in seemingly a better environment, this supercell formed and soon produced a spectacular little tornado, followed by an amazing structure show.  We finally … [Read more...]

Sunset Shelf over Desert Dust

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Of all the growing number of special moments around desert storms, this quickly became among the top few.  After observing early- to mid-afternoon thunderstorms in the borderlands southeast of Tucson, a haboob gathered from their collective outflow and churned westward, building more storms and adding more outflow.  Some of that iterative process of storm formation and propagation raised this … [Read more...]

Rollin’ Skyward

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Even it weakening states, supercells still can be beautiful, as this one was after its peak organization, while entering a more-stable air mass and shrinking.  Still, supercells often linger longer than what the surrounding environment alone would indicate, thanks to the vertical pressure-gradient forces (VPGFs) generated by their low-pressure cores developed in higher-buoyancy conditions.  That … [Read more...]

Lightning Highway

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Four of nearly 80 cloud-to-ground flashes I shot that night split the rainy, dusty monsoonal skies between Tucson and Phoenix.   The second from left did contact ground inside the rain core, and the rightmost was a split single discharge with two ground contacts performed at once.  Through several cores that crossed the same area, the strikes mostly happened in bursts of 2-5 at a time, where "a … [Read more...]