SkyPix

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

Midday Colorado Supercell

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What an active storm day this was!  Nationally, dozens of tornadoes marked a "Corn Belt outbreak" from Colorado to the Ohio Valley, including a deadly and very destructive one that night near Dayton, OH.  Personally I saw four supercells and at least three tornadoes in northeastern Colorado, between Denver and the inner corner of Nebraska.  The adventure began with this midday beauty:  a … [Read more...]

Rotating over Mesa Country

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On the last day of my "normal" spring chase trip, one final supercell spun up along the intersection of outflow boundaries, over west-central New Mexico's mesalands.   Promising as this scene may be, it represented the storm's peak; for soon it would ingest too much outflow air and wither slowly, while scooting eastward.  Were it not for an unexpectedly active bonus pattern for northern Plains … [Read more...]

Sunset Saguaro Scene

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Saguaro cacti, including one quite lofty, stately specimen, frame a brilliant sunset-lit core of rain over distant mountains, as seen from Saguaro National Park.  At right, one sees a thin, orange-lit plume of virga—precipitation not reaching the ground (yet).  A mature saguaro with more than one arm probably is in the 125–150-year-old range.   The tall one here could be older, dating from well … [Read more...]

Cumulus Spotlight

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One haggard clump of shallow convective clouds floated across the eastern Colorado sky behind a complex of thunderstorms.  Being rather moisture-starved, these cumulus clouds entrained a good deal of dry air from their surroundings and sported ragged edges and holes—the most prominent of which cast a beam of sunlight directly at our spot for just a few seconds.  An assortment of crepuscular rays … [Read more...]

Tipton Twisting

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Some tornadoes never develop beneath a wall cloud, as with this event.  After a three-way handoff involving the demise of this stout supercell's Luray tornado, and a brief interloper, the "Tipton" tornado formed tilted, then visually righted itself as a bent cone here, before quickly enlarging.  In the meantime, it formed a fitting centerpiece for a fascinating whole-storm show, with rotation … [Read more...]

Outflow Dust Blast

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With what soon became a tornadic supercell located over an hour to our north, moving away, and our storms further down the dryline in a phase of heaving severe downdraft winds well before themselves, it was a decidedly disappointing chase day.  Still, this ranks as one of the fiercest outflow-dust events I've experienced, barely able to stand to shoot, interesting in its own right when subtracting … [Read more...]