SkyPix

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

Windy Sunset Scud

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Behind a line of severe thunderstorms, the active part of the chase day ending, we settled in for sunset scenes.  While shot from the same spot, the "two sunsets in one" were different as can be from one side of the sky to another.  In the western portion, legions of fractocumulus (scud) and ragged cumulus humilis clouds raced southwestward here, some conveniently blocking the near-setting sun to … [Read more...]

Front-Lit Backshear

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A visually breathtaking yet symbolic scene unfolded one fine evening as NSSL's research radar reflected a little of the sunset glow, in turn reflected from a strongly backsheared supercell over southern Oklahoma.  [This isn't the usual meaning of "radar reflectivity"!]  The storm launched an overshooting top that, with time (below) tilted slightly westward.  Some of the overshooting dome actually … [Read more...]

Tall Ragged Funnel

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The former Horse Creek supercell moved east of the Laramie Mountains and out onto the bluff-studded High Plains of southeastern Wyoming, catching up again to an excellent vantage I had secured northeast of Cheyenne.  Moving quickly eastward (toward the right), it developed a short-lived, slowly rotating, yet distinctive funnel cloud beneath an even more ragged wall cloud.  By this time, the storm … [Read more...]

Rotation at Horse Creek

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Once upon a time in the West, a supercell formed over the southern Laramie Mountains and rolled through the foothills fully mature, rotating strongly with a well-defined rear-flank/occlusion-downdraft cut around the south side of the wall cloud.   That's as far in the process as this storm got on this attempt, failing to produce a tornado on the "inside" of the higher terrain.  It was a bit of a … [Read more...]

Surging Shelf

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A "Pioneer's Nightmare" storm churned onward relentlessly, seemingly engulfing mile after mile of northwest Kansas prairie as if effortlessly, when in fact it expended the energy of multiple nuclear warheads in the process.  Fortunately much of the involved energy transferred to the upper atmosphere, and to generating precipitation, then only a portion of that to outflow still severe enough to … [Read more...]

Funnel-Free Subvortices

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A broadly tornadic, multiple-vortex circulation continued under an unusually low, wet, scuddy cloud base for Colorado—a base that was intensely rotating, but lacking condensation funnel(s).  Here, two subvortices can be seen:  the obvious one just left of lower middle, and a fainter one to its somewhat more-distant right (NNW).   Each rotated around the other, as well as on its own axis, with the … [Read more...]