SkyPix

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

Stafford Blow: South

By

[Part 3 of 3]  Being fresher development, this bowing storm complex had not yet built up enough of a cold pool to trail along outflow boundary of its own, well to the southwest.  Instead its beautiful shelving was more symmetric from north to south.  Compare this to the south view of a larger, severe bow echo from 12 years before.  Somewhere slightly farther south of here lay the outflow boundary … [Read more...]

Stafford Blow: Middle

By

[Part 2 of 3]  But for the stubbly tan soil, tree rows and grid-straight highway of west-central Kansas as a foreground, the central part of the onrushing St. John/Stafford bow could be confused for a scene from someone's overly active imagination of the atmosphere on a science-fiction world many light-years away.   This storm layered outflow upon outflow, as it impinged on a slightly heated and … [Read more...]

Stafford Blow: North

By

[Part 1 of 3]  Irrigating the storm apparently worked, because a former supercell by now had turned into a small but severe bow echo, still with an embedded mesocyclone and large hail.   As such evolutions are wont to do, especially when forcing somewhat stabilized air from earlier outflow, this storm stacked layer upon layer pf parallel, photogenic cloud material, the bottom of course being the … [Read more...]

Electrical Ray near Sunray

By

One of the meanings of "rayo" in Spanish is "lightning flash", which makes sense given that they are natural electricity rays.  [Not to be confused with "electric rays", the jolting fish...] This "ray" cooked a bit of ground in the north-central Texas Panhandle, and formed a starkly beautiful High Plains scene in combination with the textured underside of a shelf cloud in the high foreground.  … [Read more...]

Amarillo by Mesocyclone

By

A menacingly low wall cloud, especially for the High Plains, rotated moderately, compelling close watch for anything tighter.  We did so, but it didn't produce a tornado.  Fortunately this was also close enough to the Amarillo forecast office that they could see it from the back door, from this stage on through the next 20 minutes or so.   A lot of precip already was falling behind the … [Read more...]

Panhandle Swirl

By

A severe and imposing supercell offered hail as big as tennis balls within the core, and stacked-plate structure seen from the inflow, while it churned from the north side of Amarillo east-northeastward past our location.  The High Plains annually offers such stunning storm formations for beholding by the eyes of appreciative observers.  Make no mistake, however, this is not a welcomed sight to … [Read more...]