SkyPix

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

Off 19

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After producing the infamous Wind Farm Tornado, the newer circulation to its N tightened and headed NE in the general direction of where I had been—from slightly over a mile away.  Given such a logistically unsuitable predicament, I scooted a little over a mile E to watch the area of rotational concern cross freshly repaved Oklahoma 19.  This was the resulting brief tornado at its best:  one … [Read more...]

Last Gasp in Twilight

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After producing numerous tornadoes in its march from the Red River to central Oklahoma, including the "Wind Farm Tornado" and another near OK-19, this supercell finally had spent all its intense ground-based spin.  Still, even in the fading twilight and increasingly feeble boundary-layer temperatures, a residual wall cloud continued to hang very low and visibly rotate—albeit slowly.  The supercell … [Read more...]

Gusting to Lusk

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The earliest salvo in a multiple-round convective event erupted as a promising wall of storm towers east of the Laramie Range, but then sent a gust front across the High Plains west of Lusk, capped by a pretty little arcus cloud.  Our resultant fears that the day would turn into a major convective mess, however, were ameliorated by a stunning convective display in the golden hour, south of here … [Read more...]

Outflow-Dominant Supercell

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Beneath the anvil of a broader area of earlier and ongoing convection, a pocket of residual, unstable air lay, unperturbed by all the activity around.  When two outflow boundaries merged in that unstable patch, a supercell was born.  Alas, the storm was in an environment of decent deep shear but weak low/middle-level flow.  Despite developing a healthy midlevel mesocyclone with inflow tails, this … [Read more...]

North Rim Light and Shadow

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A marvelous interplay of light and shadow, representing the golden hour's sunshine around a field of altocumulus clouds, splashes the sinuous ridges and undulating stream courses of the Grand Canyon's North Rim.  A faint but apparent haze layer above the horizon represents smoke advected eastward from a couple of fires in California.  This gorge was described by Theorore Roosevelt as, "the one … [Read more...]

Occlusions Old and New

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This storm already had produced a couple of tornadoes distantly visible to us, but seemed resigned to nontornadic occlusions by the time we closed in for more intimate observation.  This mesocyclonic handoff may have been the most fascinating, because it presented perhaps the most striking example of old and new occlusions I've seen in a supercell.  The old mesocyclone (right background) retreated … [Read more...]