SkyPix

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

Tail-End Charlie

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"Tail-end Charlie" is a decades-old storm-chaser nickname for a supercell that forms on the equatorward fringe of a band of thunderstorms.  This is that.  Born and brewed on the southwest end of an afternoon-long convective plume, the big supercell got this way by catching a region of unimpeded inflow, backed boundary-layer winds, related enlargement of low-level hodographs, stronger shear, and … [Read more...]

Flickering in the Outflow

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A field of wildflowers stretched for 1/4 mile in three directions, offering bright accompaniment to a layered shelf cloud and the long, intricate, in-core lightning discharge that followed.  This quick-moving, electrically vibrant band of thunderstorms continued east of town, then northeastward into the evening, and into a remote area not worth additional pursuit, for the food-hungry storm … [Read more...]

Wild Night Storm

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A spectacularly stacked supercell twirled southeastward over the western Kansas plains, posing for numerous photos along the way as its laminar layers marvelously metamorphosed in shape and thickness.  This storm generated so much in-cloud lightning, with near continuous frequency, as if it were a giant, strobing night light in the sky, that I was able to check camera settings and walk around in … [Read more...]

Electric Evening

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This was a prolific lightning day for me, with 70 cloud-to-ground strokes captured on the DSLR and a few interesting above-ground discharges as well.  After rolling off the high mesa country to the southwest, I grabbed a room at a familiar motel in Clayton, only to scoot out of town to photograph this briefly but brightly active core closing in from the northwest.  Subtle, pastel shades still … [Read more...]

Bueyeros Boom

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Several square inches of scrubby New Mexico earth scorched for less than a second.  That still was enough time to sterilize it of life, under around 30,000 amperes of direct current surging through that surface to illuminate the lightning channel.  This, of course, sent a nice, strong report of thunder rolling out across the shortgrass prairies.  These storms developed southward from earlier, also … [Read more...]

Electric Lasso over the Borderlands

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Though nothing special structurally, a mass of high-based, multicellular convection offered copious lightning between Tucson and Nogales.  Fortunately this electrical lasso roped only the sky, in true Ghost Riders fashion, instead of ensnaring anyone attempting to photograph it.  The storm also flung its fair share of cloud-to-ground lightning around these nearby mountains, and the scrubby desert … [Read more...]