SkyPix

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

Downdrafts, Updrafts, Chaos!

By

This scene was every bit the chaotic, mysterious convective mess that it looks!  About half an hour after staring downhill into the notch of a line-embedded supercell, the storm accelerated east-northeast.  Here, its dense, rain-wrapped main mesocyclone lurked to the right, while small but intense updrafts developed over the rear-flank gust front across most of this view.  A complicating factor:  … [Read more...]

Altocumulus Lenticularis Undulatus

By

Wavy lenticular formations soared over the shortgrass prairie of Wind Cave National Park, on the southern periphery of the Black Hills.  I don't know the cause for the constriction amidst each band; but it could be a slow-moving gravity wave or other subsident and nearly linear ripple running nearly perpendicular to the altocumulus wave train. 7 N Hot Springs SD (10 Jun 2) Looking SW 43.5501, … [Read more...]

Log Ice

By

As if prongs of the Abominable Snowman's frigid comb, a series of neatly arranged icicles clings to a log above the uncharacteristically chilled waters of Oklahoma's Lake Thunderbird.  These formed when waves and spray splashed across mostly the far side of the log during temperatures well below freezing.  After each wave, some water pouring off the log turned to ice before the next. 6 W Little … [Read more...]

Texas-Sized HP

By

For ten hours, this legendary thunderstorm lumbered eastward across northwest Texas, extraordinarily long-lived even by supercellular standards.  I was fortunate enough to witness it in some manner from just after birth to its demise after midnight.  Though it produced a few very brief, small diurnal spin-ups (lame excuses for notches on the guns of a few over-exuberant "chasers"), the … [Read more...]

Autumn in the Northern San Juans

By

This is not the sandy, red-mud-colored Cimarron River that so many of us know from northwestern and central Oklahoma, and which also drains a small part of southeastern Colorado.  Instead, it's Colorado's other, far more scenic watercourse of the same name, rife with cobbles eroded out of the northern San Juans as sharper rocks, then smoothed in tumbling through its springtime, snow-melt … [Read more...]

Dimly LIT

By

Skies darkened quickly across the western Texas Panhandle landscape, as what once was a couple of supercells sent a blast of outflow air southward.  I love this kind of light with tiered shelf clouds, but as in most such instances, had little time to stay and shoot before the storm could overtake my position with fierce gusts and wind-driven hail.  This storm would chase us out of a couple more … [Read more...]