SkyPix

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

Chiricahua Twilight: Copper

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[Part 1 of 2]  Standing exactly astride the Arizona/New Mexico line on a dirt road, I watched this astounding twilight scene unfold, just after sunset.  A short-lived storm had formed over the Chiricahua Peak, tallest mountain in the range of the same name, as moist outflow air from an earlier convective event to the northeast was forced to rise upslope.   As that storm weakened and its cloud base … [Read more...]

Skeletons of the Frye Fire

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Lightning ignited the 2017 Frye fire, which burned a lot of acreage in the Pinaleno Mountains, nearly up to the observatory telescopes on Mt. Graham.  Conifer forests, overrun in intense crown-fire bursts, stand today only as skeletal trunks and branches.  Fitting it was, then, that on my visit here, a dying mountain thunderstorm with breaks of blue sky textured the scene overhead.  On this wet … [Read more...]

Young Storm in the Pinalenos

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I drove this lonely road—not the only one that I've ever known—leading to a young cumulonimbus rising off the southern part of the Mt. Graham massif, in eastern Arizona's Pinaleno Mountains.  When a storm blows up and poses like this, practically begging for photography, why not accommodate?  This was a rewarding storm-observing and shooting day, being able to experience this midday activity and … [Read more...]

Desert Shelf

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Starting high in the mountains above Silver City, a collection of multicell storms rushed out onto the deserts north of I-10 and aggregated their outflows, while new cells developed atop that.  The resulting cold pool kept generating new thunderstorms as it swept southward and southwestward over the desert floor south of I-10 and toward the Mexican border from Lordsburg, occasionally raising dust, … [Read more...]

Tandem Thunderers

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Dancing along the edge of a heavy-rain core, two cloud-to-ground flashes pop the desert terrain between Phoenix and Tucson.  I photographed dozens of CGs during this fun and productive late-evening shoot, all from one spot!  I almost missed this, and would have hated myself if I had.  I nearly had decided to go to my motel room, tired after a day in the Catalina Mountains.  Instead I mustered the … [Read more...]

First Warm-Frontal Tornado

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Having been initially out of position for earlier supercells forming near an outflow-reinforced warm front and producing a brief tornado or two each, we zipped north from the Channing area to see if newer and nearer towers, visible to our north, could grow into a storm and achieve the same feat.  They most certainly did, and then some.  The resulting supercell became the longest-lived "anchor … [Read more...]