SkyPix

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

Wall Cloud at Sunset

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This still ranks as the most stunning, brilliantly lit sunset wall cloud I've seen.  Every bit of these colors on the Provia slide blazed into our eyeballs, and still more in the surrounding sky.  No scan, no slide, no video can do justice to the richness of the scene that the sky gave us for just a few minutes, one stormy May day outside Childress.  A mesocyclone formed along the intersection of … [Read more...]

Ice Polygons

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Polygonal ice formed on a very shallow (a few inches to a couple feet), relatively calm part of a Lake Thunderbird cove, as air temperatures slowly but relentlessly fell to below zero degrees F.  This appears to be a hybrid of processes that form round "pancake ice" on open water, and "ice-wedge polygons" atop frozen landscapes with high water content.  Clearly, chunks of ice that were not round … [Read more...]

Under Arcus

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The setting sun's warm-colored rays were filtered and softened by a thin rain core at right before being reflected, in turn, off the ragged base of the arcus cloud overhead.  The storm began as a high-based, weak supercell, then became "Tail-end Charlie" for a long squall line.  It saved its most stirring visual display for its dying, gusting-out phase, proving that outflow can be beautiful … [Read more...]

Chilling at the Lakeshore

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There's so much happening here!  For starters, the deepest arm of Lake Thunderbird, which would freeze over completely the very next day, still was warm enough to remain mostly liquid, wafting lake-effect vapors of cloud condensation into the sub-zero cold.  A mix of spray and cloud riming left ice coating these grasses and bushes, which wore skirts of ice deposited (and planed off at the bottom) … [Read more...]

White Is Red

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Multiple heavy-precipitation supercells rolled over Lubbock and vicinity the night before, with other storms dumping copious rains northward toward Plainview.  Those deluges all caused extensive and deep flooding that closed Interstate 27, along with several other highways and streets.  All that water had to drain somewhere, and a good bit of it roared off the Caprock into the White River, which … [Read more...]

Menacing Grand Island

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Rolling right down the central Plains' noted Lincoln Highway (US-30), this previously tornadic supercell had taken a long break from any serious attempts at more tornado action.  Then it produced a brief, faint "landspout" (nonmesocyclonic tornado) away from the main updraft area, followed by this low-hanging, fairly strongly rotating wall cloud.  The problem?  This reorganization was occurring … [Read more...]