SkyPix

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

Electrical Lacework

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As a severe thunderstorm complex moved away, it continued flinging cloud-to-ground lightning, mostly less-forked than earlier, while increasing its delivery of "crawler" discharges within the trailing precipitation region.  The delicate and intricate appearance of these filaments belies their deadliness, should one be unfortunate enough to sample any of the electricity directly.  At distance, … [Read more...]

Sterling Sunset in the Desert

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Even though the thunderstorms that produced the brilliantly lit, anvil cirrus clouds dissipated before I could get any decent lightning shots, this sunset scene was a wonderful consolation prize.  Light on the lower cumulus and fractus clouds had to travel through more of our atmosphere to get there, and therefore is redder.  The variation between low and high clouds, in both light and texture, … [Read more...]

Dark Turbulent Arcus Base

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The day's outflow-dominant storm intercept finished, we rolled south, the hunters now the hunted, cruising at barely legal speeds on the interstate highway to stay ahead of the core.  As we surfed the cold outflow winds, we remained for a long time beneath the "whale's mouth" of an uncommonly beautiful, well-defined, slate-blue underbelly of the arcus cloud.  The striking coloration may have been … [Read more...]

CG behind Arcus

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While taking a short break from escaping this raging squall, we stopped to admire and photograph its tiered shelf cloud and arcus formation with a windmill-punctuated wheat field in the foreground.  This was the rare shot where the lightning serendipitously struck as I happened to click the shutter, though I had been attempting unsuccessfully to capture a few other strokes manually.  We soon would … [Read more...]

Northern-Sky Spectacular

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The best sunsets so often happen on the back side of storm complexes, as in this large field of mammatus. Anticipating the timing and placement, and being south of any substantial hail, I let a former supercell, which was merging with a larger area of convection, roll over me in place.   That effectively is the same as penetrating the storms from front to rear, but without going anywhere.  This … [Read more...]

Wave Clouds Opposing

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A series of Kelvin-Helmholtz waves can be seen in the high clouds—ragged, but obvious, the biggest of them seen "atop" a single breaking wave on the nearer, lower chunk of fractus (scud). Kelvin-Helmholtz waves develop from shearing instabilities, when adjoining layers of air of different densities move at different rates of speed.  Much of the time, such waves are invisible, with no condensation … [Read more...]