SkyPix

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

Nocturnal Hail Drift

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Runoff from heavy rain carried hail to this spot near a curb, where it floated into drifts. The largest stones were about an inch in diameter—barely severe by official standards, and not damaging to cars or windows we saw. A fascinating variety of hail opacity appeared here despite the lack of variation in size. Also, the color shift between the white hail in most of the photo and the tan hue … [Read more...]

Stratocumulus in Austrian Architecture

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Eastern Austrian architecture is interesting on its own merit. When partly decorated in the form of cloud and sunlight reflections, it becomes magical: aged and static, yet ephemeral and fluid. Slowly moving, quickly evolving, the interplay of light and shadow around stratocumulus clouds and off the left window offered an endless variety of scenes played across a small glass panel. Wiener … [Read more...]

Multiple Vortices in the Hills

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After an initial, apparently single-vortex phase, the third tornado from the Canadian supercell complex broke down into two, sometimes three visible subvortices swirling individually, whilst orbiting the parent tornado's lower reaches. After a couple minutes of this sort of action, the slowly southward-moving tornado dissipated in the loess hills overlooking town. Delicately vaporous, yet … [Read more...]

Hail Shaft of a Hook

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Warm-toned colors of late-afternoon sunlight tinted this hail shaft, which was part of a hook echo wrapping from left to right around an intensely rotating mesocyclone. A small rainbow segment can be seen in lighter precipitation at lower right, beneath the inner flanking towers. The supercell was moving away from us after producing hailstones over four inches in diameter in the town of Oregon, … [Read more...]

Snow-Dusted Desert Mountains

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For a few days in the winter of early 2015, the scrubby mountains of eastern Arizona, in the upper Salt River watershed, shed their normally bleak appearance for this wondrous and unusual scene of fresh, light snow. Seen from the airplane, it was a somewhat hazy view, but stacked polarizing and UV/haze filters took care of that mess, making the scene pop as nicely as if the air were clean. This is … [Read more...]