SkyPix

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

Light and Shadow: Badlands Fractus

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Following a deliciously orange, rainy sunrise, early-morning sunshine spread across a beautiful Badlands foreground, while fractocumulus tufts drifted in and out of shadows from unseen clouds behind.  Still damp to saturated from heavy rains the evening before, colorful bands in the mixed-source sedimentary formations emboldened their tones even more in the early sunshine.  This scene was magical … [Read more...]

The Abandoned Blues

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Upward creep of water tables in the eastern Sandhills of Nebraska finally overtook this farmstead, creating a shallow lake in what had been mostly dry lowlands, and leaving both old (foreground) and newer (background) houses to flood, inundated and abandoned.  Well-protected from hail, the houses instead will succumb to wet rot.  Between the blue sky, blue metal roofs, and blue-reflecting waters, … [Read more...]

Shed Rod Bent

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The bottom of a metal shed was bolted to a series of metal rods like this, anchored in the ground.  This was a rare case where the anchoring was sturdier than the construction (it was, after all, a shed), and little evidence remained of what had been anchored.  The rods were bent toward the east and east-northeast, the heading of most of the shed pieces.  This rod was festooned with a piece of … [Read more...]

One Last Spark

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This scene epitomizes late afternoons on the High Plains in late summer, but it came about in a rather remarkable way.  The first in a series of supercells, forming over and near Pikes Peak and training off to the adjoining Plains, withered away in somewhat more-stable inflow air, its updraft essentially gone, its remnant core shriveling behind an elevated arcus feature.  The storm had one message … [Read more...]

Panorama of Destruction

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Extensive rubble from assorted houses, accessory structures and vehicles fills the core of the Spencer tornado's damage swath across town.  Wind forces—but especially wind-driven debris of all sorts, flying at speeds of 100–200 mph—battered these trees and stripped them of leaves, some bark, and many small branches.  In the distance (actually just a couple blocks, since this was a wide angle … [Read more...]

Noble Arcus

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Although this wouldn't seem so, the Noble supercell of 2020 still was rotating, at least in midlevels, and would redevelop its low-level mesocyclone again several miles to the east-southeast.  In the meantime, however, it couldn't get out of the way of its own outflow—here signified above the surface by this shelf cloud.  The actual surface gust front usually hits before the shelf edge arrives, … [Read more...]