SkyPix

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

Hail in Fallen Leaves

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After producing a funnel cloud farther west near Grand Lake, the Afton supercell crossed the Missouri border and moved deeper into the Ozarks. With its environment and the terrain both becoming less favorable, I let the storm go, cutting northward behind it to see what hail it had dropped.   As expected for a cold-core supercell in the winter, it produced copious amounts of small hail, drifted … [Read more...]

Specimen of Beauty

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[Part 3 of 3]  The HP supercell began to weaken as I got farther southeast, getting ahead of the storm again it angled likewise.  But the curved cold outflow (left), the mesocyclone at center, and the tail feature (former flank) at right, acted like a miniature version of the cold front, low, and warm front structure of big synoptic cyclones.  It isn't too hard to imagine a weather map with those … [Read more...]

Rotating Interface

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[Part 2 of 3] As the southeast-moving HP supercell's path and mine converged, the shelf cloud structures cleared away enough so that I could more closely examine the structure along the inflow-outflow interface.  This ragged wall cloud—part of a mesocyclone at the northern apex of the storm's rear-flank gust front—was slowly rotating.  Meanwhile, hail over 2.5 inches in diameter pummeled the … [Read more...]

Happy Union HP

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[Part 1 of 3]  At first glance, this looks like a big, mean-looking shelf cloud belonging in the Gallery of Outflow.  But look closer at the structures in this 28-mm wide-angle shot.  Outflow at left and inflow at right are actually dancing a mesocyclonic tango.  The HP (heavy-precipitation) supercell's main precipitation core is at lower left (NNW), sending outflow eastward (from left to right) … [Read more...]

Cold-Core Funnel Part 3

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[Part 3 of 3]  How do we get supercells and funnel clouds (and in at least one case elsewhere this day, a brief tornado) when surface temperatures feel so cool (50s F)?  This isn't a so-called "cold-air" funnel", but instead, a fully supercellular circulation in the cold-core region of a midtropospheric cyclone.  It's not common in these parts, but when temperatures 10,000-20,000 feet up are … [Read more...]

Cold-Core Funnel Part 2

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[Part 2 of 3]  After barely failing to arrive in time for an earlier, brief tornado northwest of Nowata, I zigzagged southeast, looking at a couple other small, interesting but non-tornadic supercells along the way.  This one came this close to being a tornado, but despite observing very attentively from only about a mile away, I saw no evidence of a ground circulation strong enough to call it … [Read more...]