SkyPix

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

Outflow-Dominant Supercell

By

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

By

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

By

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...]

Separate Funnel Back There

By

After producing a scenic tube in Wyoming, this supercell spun across the western plains of Nebraska for several hours, threatening on a few occasions to spin up another tornado.  This probably was the closet such attempt to succeeding, when a vigorously rotating wall cloud passed above the rolling wheat fields of central Banner County.  The near-tornado, however, was from an old, occluded … [Read more...]

Bifurcated Wall Cloud

By

Several in a series of rapidly rotating but short-lived wall clouds formed in this northern part of a merged supercell pair, each low-level mesocyclone undercut by precipitation before it could produce a tornado.  In this case, the occlusion downdraft cut the wall cloud nearly in half (bifurcation), though more wall clouds would form shortly.  Diffused sunset light from the distance cast the … [Read more...]

Merged Pair at Sunset

By

This wide-angle view encompasses most of a large, complex storm, known in storm intercept and V.O.R.T.EX.-2 circles as the "Lamar supercell".  It actually was the large, heavy-precipitation spawn of a merger between initially distinct northern and southern supercells.  The northern storm took over, its mesocyclonic cycling continuing as manifest by the large, low-hanging wall clouds that it kept … [Read more...]