SkyPix

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

Night Like Day: Tornado and Lightning

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Following the unseen dissipation stage of the Minneola "Kansas Sunset" tornado, this larger vortex formed northeast of Ford and trucked along deeper into the dark of night, with a maximum surveyed width of 875 yards.  Fortunately it missed population centers.  Despite the late hour, this photo's brightness can be attributed to high ISO offsetting short exposure time, with lightning as an … [Read more...]

Tilted Trees Abstraction

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Flooding of Lake Thunderbird, east of Norman, offered both this arboreal abstraction and a rather unsanitary one. Water rising into uncommon places presents the dichotomy of muddy, often polluted messes with hazards to people, and peculiar photographic compositions to depict the flooding in ways seldom seen otherwise.2 NW Little Axe OK (10 May 15) Looking ESE 35.2483, -97.2379 … [Read more...]

Supercell Surfing Supercell

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This wild formation had origins worthy of a swashbuckling meteorological adventure tale. A young, small supercell formed as a surface-based storm and quickly began rotating, in the moist, helicity-enhanced inflow region of a larger, older, established supercell. The newer storm produced some severe hail as it merged northward into the forward flank of the older one, while an unrelated outflow … [Read more...]

Supercell with Asperatus

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This extraordinary cloudscape assembled from an extraordinary recipe: the merger of a newer, smaller supercell into the forward flank of an older, larger one, at the same time an outflow boundary from a separate area of storms crashed the party from the east. This updraft, region, which still rotated rather obviously, represented what was left of the original supercell's mesocyclone area after … [Read more...]

Daylight Darkens the High Plains

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When beholding an imposing scene such as this, and pondering the relative paucity of meteorological understanding of the era, it's easy to understand how early Great Plains settlers may have considered the world's end as a fate not much more alarming than the biggest, loudest, most ominously stygian storms rampaging uncontrollably toward their homesteads. Even then, this churning maelstrom—a … [Read more...]

Panhandle Storm Coming

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When an older supercell, moving hard rightward, merges with a newer supercell forming in its inflow region, all simultaneously meeting an unrelated, large outflow boundary moving westward from an old area of thunderstorms, something interesting shall happen. And so it was, here in the western Texas Panhandle: an evolution of the combined, semi-elevated convective mass into a deep, dark complex … [Read more...]