SkyPix

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

Towering Cumulus on the Dryline

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This is a much different breed of towering cumulus than the maritime version from nine months later and over a thousand miles southeast.  Here, unlike on a land-breeze circulation, the low-middle level flow was strongly sheared, causing the tilt.  The cloud looks less robust than the previous example because it was drawing in dry air from west of the dryline, on which it formed.  This dry … [Read more...]

Ice Beads on Spider Web

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Even amidst great destruction, such as wrought by the October 2020 central Oklahoma ice storm, one can find beauty and astonishment in little places.  The engineering marvel of a spider web, rendered taut by holding a bigger ice chunk unseen off lower right, displayed frozen necklace beads of ice while freezing rain still was falling.  The images rendered through the beads inverted land and sky, … [Read more...]

Millions of Drips

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The title is how this scene came together, 600 feet under the limestone scrublands of the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico.  Every one of these fluidly sculptured columns has been a drip line of calcified water for millennia, slowly building down and up until the conjoining of stalactites with stalagmites.  The artwork is far from finished. 4 W Whites City NM (9 Jun 14) … [Read more...]

Little but Lively

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Rotating with a fervor I seldom had witnessed before in my young life, this small, scuddy and tightly circulating wall cloud looked and acted like it was going to produce a tornado any second.  The elongated scud chunk to its lower left formed, rose helically and merged up into the wall cloud, all in less than 10 seconds.  Alas, it was the late 1980s in Oklahoma, and the tornado simply refused to … [Read more...]

Future Fossils?

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Hail landed in the mud and melted about 18 hours before this photo, leaving well-defined impressions which quite accurately documented the size of the hailstones.  This sort of record, when available, certainly beats the usual overestimates of hail size provided by excited spotters who seldom witness (and even more seldom measure) large hail.  Perhaps, somewhere in the world, semi-spheric cavities … [Read more...]

Sturdy but Sideways

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Across the Great Plains, many small structures are built sturdily, but are either poorly attached to their foundations or utterly unanchored.  Then a severe wind hits, and all that good workmanship which went into the building is wasted!  This is a great example from the north side of the Haysville-Wichita tornado of 16 May 1991, which I had witnessed.  Although parts of one wall and the roof … [Read more...]