SkyPix

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

Cryptic Left Mover

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On the way from intercepting the Faith HP hail machine toward intercepting another right-moving hail producer near Rapid City, my own course got intercepted.  This storm formed to the south of the most direct route, evolved into a left-moving, elongated, anticyclonic supercell, and traveled northeastward across the best course.  It also produced a large area of outflow that crippled, but did not … [Read more...]

Great Plains Golden Hour

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One of my most scenically and photographically rewarding chase trips of 1997 continued down the length of the Oklahoma Panhandle, with the warming of colors in the "golden hour".  The wonderment played itself across an already splendor-splashed sky laden with mammatus and a rainbow, albeit with a different windmill for foreground this go-'round.  The red sunset sky near Slapout would finish the … [Read more...]

Hail Machine’s Hail

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A severe, heavy-precipitation supercell, of the type storm chasers and spotters often nickname an "HP Hail Machine", dumped a large quantity of significant severe hail west and south of Faith, SD.  From north of Faith, I went south of town and chose that viewing perspective, since the storm already was closing in on the west option.  After it passed off into a relative road void, I broke off to … [Read more...]

HP Hail Machine

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Experienced storm observers shall take one look at this scene and understand, foremost, that there's probably a lot of hail in there.  Indeed this was a hail factory, the grayish-white mass of rear-flank precipitation surging southeast behind and under that ragged shelf cloud, that core reflecting nearly as much light back to the observer as the cloud itself.  The arcus formed nearly a vertical … [Read more...]

Glaciation

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Here is the moment when deep towering cumulus (containing cumulus congestus) turns to cumulonimbus: the ice-crystal development known as glaciation.  Sometimes, as here, glaciation occurs when the towers penetrate into pileus clouds that have developed at what will become anvil level.  Within minutes, the icy anvil was fully developed and spreading downshear, away from this vantage.  Periodic … [Read more...]

Scud before Congestus

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Fleeting and small, the flimsiest shreds of scuddy fractocumulus cloud material drift darkly in front of the face of a powerful bomb of atmospheric energy release, in the form of cumumlus congestus clouds.  Why was the scud so dark, the convection so bright?  The answer is in differential lighting.  The scud was closer and lower in the sky, in the shadow of some other clouds behind our backs.  The … [Read more...]