SkyPix

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

Charged Path Aloft

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Only a few inches wide, a filament of current-conducting plasma known as lightning illuminates sky and earth for many miles around.  High, horizontal discharges like this frequently occur in the trailing precipitation area of convective complexes.  I'm loath to use the term "stratiform" for this process, as is found in many description of this area of thunderstorms, because it is convective in … [Read more...]

Sunrise Tree: Fall 2021

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The opening Sunrise Tree scene for the cool season of 2021–22 arrived with leaves afloat on the pond, some still in the trees.  The woods silhouetted a sunrise cloudscape textured with subtlety and not sharpness, where a large, fuzzy swath of variably thin cirrus caught first light and luxuriantly dappled the sky.  It was a moment evoking gratitude for its very presence, and for life as a whole, … [Read more...]

Frontal Arcus, Part 2

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[Part 2 of 2]  As the frontal arcus approached, of course it dominated more of the sky, flushing birds from their morning lair.  Wind shift from southwesterly to northwesterly would arrive within less than a minute.   The fundamental processes making this arcus are the same as a thunderstorm gust front, but for the source of the cold air:  a synoptic cyclone instead of mesoscale to local-scale … [Read more...]

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...]