SkyPix

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

Works of Wind and Water

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Geologic change is an all-season process in the Painted Desert.  Not far from The Tepees in Petrified Forest National Park, the combined action of wind and water has laid bare a fascinating erosional landscape.  Dry the great majority of the time, this area experiences its greatest changes a few times a year—mainly during summer "monsoon" season—when isolated heavy thunderstorm cores wash … [Read more...]

Twilight Right Mover

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Now a lone supercell, what had been a "Tail-end Charlie" broke south-southeastward away from its formative convective mass and shrunk gradually—though still a sizable storm at this point—and began taking on progressively more-laminar form as the inflow layer slowly stabilized.  In this messy, intermediate stage, the storm effused a dark, forlorn and foreboding form, dominating the western skyline … [Read more...]

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...]