SkyPix

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

Ghostly Updraft over Highway

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A cold pool from the distant cores built upon itself, sending a steady push of outflow eastward across the High Plains of northeastern New Mexico.  After precipitation ultimately doused an oddly tinted updraft area farther west, this one developed and likewise moved southward across the road where I just had cruised.  Above the shelfy, somewhat convective and somewhat laminar base hovered a … [Read more...]

Oddly Lit Updraft Base

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A high-based updraft, with a small based fronted by a blended convective and laminar, shelf-like formation, formed fairly rapidly over the road and over me, then moved southward.  Its curious presentation in the rear-view mirror compelled me to pull off this sparsely traveled New Mexico two-lane and shoot.  The updraft also was elevated, given the cool outflow from its location nearly to mine, and … [Read more...]

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...]