SkyPix

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

Gusting to Lusk

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The earliest salvo in a multiple-round convective event erupted as a promising wall of storm towers east of the Laramie Range, but then sent a gust front across the High Plains west of Lusk, capped by a pretty little arcus cloud.  Our resultant fears that the day would turn into a major convective mess, however, were ameliorated by a stunning convective display in the golden hour, south of here … [Read more...]

Outflow-Dominant Supercell

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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...]