SkyPix

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

Cumuli over the Tepees (Painted Desert)

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Cumulus humilis, cumulus mediocris and fractocumulus clouds intermingle over a western desert landscape of the sort first photographed in monochrome large format by the likes of Ansel Adams and Adam Clark Vroman—pioneering photographers who not only noticed and appreciated the sky, but made it an indispensable aspect of so many of their classical landscape images.  Note the faint reddish tinge on … [Read more...]

Liberal Approach

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This was the first photo from a rare "after-dinner storm chase", where supper amongst friends on the north side of Liberal was interrupted by sweet atmospheric dessert:  the development and approach of a finely sculpted, if somewhat outflow-dominant, supercell a few miles outside town.  When we went inside to eat, drink and make merriment with friends, a cluster of mushy storms to our distant W … [Read more...]

Bands of Light

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After a beautiful supercell stage, this storm linked up with several others and formed a prodigiously sweeping panorama of tiers and striations across the southwest Kansas plains.  Light of internal and external sources illuminated the wide-angle scene, starting with the pastel glows of twilight at left, blending slowly into diffused flashes of in-cloud lightning at right.  There wasn't a great … [Read more...]

Banded St. Jo Supercell

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In the final daylight cycle of a long-lived supercell, wild striations arched from nearly overhead, southwestward to what was left of the storm's updraft base.  The spectacular scene strongly resembled another strikingly banded, decaying storm I witnessed in the Nebraska Sandhills a few years before.  The Nebraska storm was outflow-dominant and not an identifiable supercell at the time; but the … [Read more...]

Supercell Pair: Southern

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What had been three nearby supercells distilled themselves down to two:  this one, which had a classical horseshoe base about 45 minutes earlier, and a differently shaped but equally beautiful northern storm centered less than 15 miles away.  It was a marvelous experience to behold two such spectacles simultaneously at such close quarters, with outstanding visual clarity.  Both storms were … [Read more...]

Supercell Pair: Northern

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This storm, somewhat more laminar in appearance than its nearby southern neighbor, churned toward the ESE, just N of Colorado's Arkansas River Valley, for over two hours.  Soon it would merge with the slightly younger southern storm to form a big, single supercell that would move off into the night and over southwestern Kansas.  The interaction between the two storms, just prior to their merger, … [Read more...]