SkyPix

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

Outflow Power

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The underside of an arcus cloud shows a classical, characteristic, crumpled shape.  These clouds form in turbulent uplift of warm air, which rises over the relatively cold dome of wind hurled earthward by the storm's core.  The turbine here faces the wind and reveals its northwesterly direction.  Thunderstorm outflow bothers observers at times, but is good news for Texas electricity customers when … [Read more...]

Bighorn Basin Supercell

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This was a rare treat:  a supercell spinning over northern Wyoming's arid yet starkly beautiful Bighorn Basin.  The basin is surrounded on all side by mountains, including the lofty Bighorns to the east, with only a very narrow gap in the north connecting it to the Great Plains of southern Montana.   As such, very little precipitation falls here, with storms mostly staying in the mountains or over … [Read more...]

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...]