SkyPix

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

Hill City Tornado

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From the left (SE) side of a ferociously turbulent wall cloud, this classical looking tornado formed, wrapping in and out of dense rain curtains, clearly visible to me only for about half its 28 minute lifespan. Light conditions were dark and contrast poor, as often is the case under huge and rainy supercells, but I did manage to get a couple of passable shots of the vortex before it fattened and … [Read more...]

Anvil Crawlers

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What had been a rather unremarkable and short-distance storm observing trip by day turned unexpectedly spectacular by night, thanks to the merging of several multicell and weak supercell thunderstorms into a small but cohesive cluster.  The lightning was sporadic on this evening, however, and often evaded my slide camera's open shutter.  A few other equally grand displays either began or ended too … [Read more...]

Silhouetting by Sparks

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Bright, frequent lightning at a safe distance affords storm observers a great opportunity to track the evolution of cloud features.  This storm had been a supercell and was merging into a cluster of newly developed cells to become a mesoscale convective system (MCS).  The nearly continuous electrical display either silhouetted or cast aglow all the convective and precipitation structures, in … [Read more...]

Asperatus before the Name

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Low altostratus—sometimes with wavy bases since known as undulatus asperatus or asperitas—often appears in the early stages of destabilizing return flows over the southern Plains, when the surface is still relatively cool.  These undulations were unusually deep and well defined.  This also was my first film slide of this cloud formation, years before any specific name was proposed for it. Later … [Read more...]

Farm Lightning with Asperatus

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Down on the farm, grazing cows and calves puttered along, unfazed by the growing flashes and booms in the northwestern sky.  An elevated thunderstorm, rooted above the boundary layer and beyond a field of fuzzy asperatus (a.k.a. asperitas) clouds, formed in a zone of strengthening low-level warm advection ahead of a larger and growing convective complex. 6 WNW Mustang OK (8 May 13) Looking … [Read more...]

Flanking Spike

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There's nothing by this title in any paper cloud atlas.  There's nothing in a conventional cloud atlas quite like this feature.  Therefore, since it's my digital cloud atlas, there's nothing keeping it out of this one.  Several times over my decades of storm observing, I have noticed abrupt, laminar to somewhat convective spikes marking the very rear of flanking lines of supercells or squall … [Read more...]