SkyPix

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

Minco Tornado: Wide Angle

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Before breaking off "Storm A", we saw the very distant Fort Cobb tornado under this supercell's base, then after arriving on this storm, a few more mostly fuzzy, short-lived ones until the Minco vortex took root. This tornado featured a scuddy, wildly gyrating condensation form, and underwent rapid changes between cone, multivortex, barrel-shaped, and back again. It was the tenth of 20 tornadoes … [Read more...]

Rotation in Sunshine

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Despite its dangerous appearance, this gaudily hued and moderately rotating wall cloud actually proved to be delicate as eggshells, ingesting dry air and dissipating with alacrity. Soon afterward, the storm finished a rapid occlusion and reorganization process, resulting in an amazing show of colorful rotation across the northern and northeastern sky with sunset light still beamed beneath. … [Read more...]

Draining Badlands

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From Ice Ages to today, the Little Missouri River, and its local tributaries and gullies, have carved and carried countless megatons of loose rock, sand, clay and loess off the badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Some sediment from this marvel of the northern Great Plains helped to build Louisiana, or ended up on the seabed of Gulf of Mexico, before the big dams of the Dakotas tamed the … [Read more...]

Small, Ragged, Rotating

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A high-based supercell, with skeletal yet sharp texturing, seemed more fitting over the central High Plains than the red-dirt flatlands just northwest of the Oklahoma City metro. The wall cloud at left, though narrow and scuddy, rotated steadily. This caused concern that it might produce a tornado were the circulation to tighten up any further. Instead, a surge of outflow kicked past and under … [Read more...]

Spreading Anvil Cloud

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Despite the small multicellular updraft area, it was intense enough to pump copious volumes of moisture into the anvil—a cloud formation unto itself, but one that is a defining part of (and dependent upon) cumulonimbi. The small cumuli at right, beneath the NW edge of the anvil, are splendid examples of convection forming along a differential-heating boundary. We often see such cloud lines … [Read more...]

Arcus Cloud over the Flint Hills

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The storm-intercept day began way up in Council Bluffs, IA, and ended east of Wichita, KS, with this beautiful skyscape. Along the way, we saw a few supercells, most heavy-precipitation in character, one with a classical rotating wall cloud, and even a flanking-line funnel. After all that afternoon action, this was an ideal way to finish the day. Atop a limestone plateau fringing the Flint … [Read more...]