SkyPix

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

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...]

Haze

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Ever since several steamy summer days visiting Houston relatives in childhood, when I was frustratingly unable to see anything above but pale milky sky and not the cumulonimbus clouds making audible thunder, I've found urban haze—derived mainly from "wet" sulfate aerosols associated with pollution sources—to be nothing but ugly. I still do. Yet this is a cloud and sky site, and like it or not, … [Read more...]

Huge Hail

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This enormous hail, up to 4-1/2 inches in maximum diameter, is a potent reminder to avoid the hail core wrapping around the rim of the mesocyclone. Having misplaced the calipers I had then, and still today, I used a standard-sized reference object for comparison. A few minutes before, a 4-incher hit the metal strip above my vehicle's windshield, busting a hole in the adjoining section of … [Read more...]

Aqueous Influences

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The peculiar combination of exposed, gray sandstone bedrock and reddish pebble beach can be explained easily using (what else, given the theme here) water work! The bedrock was exposed and smoothed by glaciation, then smoothed even more by mostly wintertime wave action ever since, while freeze-thaw cycles acted to push out sand grains and further shape the mass around natural faults and … [Read more...]