SkyPix

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

Lava Lake Glow on Low Clouds

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As the evening deepened and stratus clouds lowered over Kilauea caldera's highly active Halemaumau Crater, the lava lake rose, at times splashing distant gobs of fountain lava above the plane of the visible rim.  That was an uncommon sight, and one we were fortunate to witness.  The distinctive orange glow of the lava shone brightly here, both in the stratus and in the flammagenitus cloud plume of … [Read more...]

Between a Mesocyclone and a Tornado

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The rising dust under this ragged but rapidly rotating wall cloud also was moving around in a closed circulation—just not as visually intensely as the clouds above.   If I had to guess, it was near the margins of the lower EF0 wind threshold of 65-mph three-second gusts, but of course this storm did not have a mobile radar or in situ anemometer involved, to establish better confidence.  The vortex … [Read more...]

More Truck-Stop Thunder

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A needed respite from the road turned into a marvelous electrical show in the sky outside a northern Oklahoma truck stop.  Several magnificent discharges split the rainy sky before the responsible elevated storm raced off to the east-northeast and weakened.  Looking at this alone, one wouldn't guess that feet behind me sat a row of diesel-exhaust-belching 18-wheelers idling and rumbling away. … [Read more...]

Double Reflected Convective Pastels

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A weakening supercell moved over cool outflow from earlier storms, combining with some fall foliage at ground level to dazzle who witnessed the spectacle with a brief but brilliant splash of pastel tones.  The dominant light source for the scene came from a strange direction, too:  northeast (left)!  Sunset light first was refracted through a combination of thinly clouded and cloud-free … [Read more...]

The Green Flash

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My second attempt at photographing the elusive "green flash" also barely worked, after barely nabbing another one over the Gulf from Florida, a couple years before.  This type is known as an inferior-mirage flash, where the sun is below the horizon, but a mirage under a thermal inversion acts as a thin, edge-on prismatic lens to separate the blue-green sunlight and bend a sliver of it over the … [Read more...]

Warm Outflow

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This is the first image in SkyPix specifically titled "outflow" that isn't in the Gallery of Outflow!  The name, both sarcastic and somewhat literally true, instead describes a 2,000-degree oozing inferno that sculpts its own fluid art anew every minute—a flow of rock, not air.  Destruction and renewal run downhill together in a river of rock, remaking the world everywhere it flows.  Episode 61g … [Read more...]