SkyPix

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

Auroral Glow over Norman

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Although not the main auroral show for the night (that was a vivid salmon-red band to the south), the rest of the central Oklahoma sky to its poleward side assumed varying levels of magenta to turquoise-tinted glow that doesn't happen on other nights not so hypercharged in the upper atmosphere by solar activity.  The deeper reddish part at right graded into the bright glow that arched across the … [Read more...]

Wrapping yet Dusty

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How can a tornado be wrapping in rain, yet covered in (and surrounded by) so much dust?  The dust came first.  Though not necessarily obvious from this perspective, a good deal of the wrapping rain also was outside the dust at this point, though some was intermingled, since the precip cascade below cloud base was relatively young.  What fell over the next few minutes, in the hook, was a muddy … [Read more...]

Mammatus over Missouri

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Fortunate to find one of the few flat, open areas of north-central Missouri, I found that this marvelous scene and some later crawler lightning rewarded all the time, effort and expense to get to this point in time and space.  The choice less than an hour before was straightforward:   keep trying to dig a brief, low-contrast and probably not photogenic tornado out of increasingly murky, rainy … [Read more...]

Ominous Extravagance

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A dangerously severe yet alluringly beautiful supercell airbrushes the Great Plains sky with chunks, platforms, streaks, and swirls of rapidly evolving cloud textures, tinted in the pastels of filtered afternoon light.  As the storm was both fast-moving and occasionally flinging hot bolts of electricity in disturbingly close proximity, appreciation time was reduced to nervous intervals of several … [Read more...]

“Sandwiched” Sunset Mammatus

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Anvils aggregated together into one cloud shield, from at least four supercells, produced this splendid, sunset-lit mammatus field over southern Nebraska, visible through the gap seen between foreground low cloud not sunlit, and the relatively dark ground.  A fraction of this light, in turn, reflected off the south side of a beautiful twilight supercell. 4 WNW Cowles NE (7 Jun 24) Looking … [Read more...]

Badlands Storm

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Symmetry of storm clouds and wildflowers very briefly bracketed the low, rolling hills and eroding layers of South Dakota’s Badlands, as a squall moved in from the Black Hills.   While nowhere nearly as powerful as the 2020 derecho in this area, this thunderstorm still produced measured severe winds nearby, also at Cactus Flat. 6 NW Interior SD (10 Jun 24) Looking WNW 43.7951, -102.0455   … [Read more...]