SkyPix

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

Fog in the Appalachians

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The wilderness road rose into a stratus deck high up near the ridge line of Potts Mountain, cloaking us in a cool fog so uncharacteristic of late July.  Slide film captured the look but couldn't translate the sound, smells and feel of the moment.  It was a surrealistically calm scene—very quiet and misty, the only sound being the dripping of water off leaves in the forest.  The smell was … [Read more...]

Messy Mesocyclone

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Two hundred fifty miles back and forth for this?  Why, yes!  We had started the day northwest of the warm front in Kimball, needed an electronic repair nearest done in Cheyenne, WY, while forecast-targeting the northeastern corner of Colorado, northeast of a mesolow along the front where convergence should be maximized.  I like challenges.  High-speed-limit High Plains interstate:  no problem!  We … [Read more...]

Colorado Landspout

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A "landspout" is storm-observer slang for a non-supercell tornado, most often seen in relatively dry environments with weak wind shear and high-based thunderstorms.  On this day, vertical shear favored supercells, and one did develop farther south; however, the process behind this tornado (shot on slide film) was not that of a mesocyclone.  Such tornadoes typically move slowly and take shape as a … [Read more...]

Mammatus Crawler

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This scene blends two of my favorite elements of thunderstorms:  mammatus and lightning.  After experiencing a sublime stormy sunset to the WNW, we turned our backs to the fading light as the electrical show ramped up in the eastern sky. Just a hint of indigo twilight filtered through the thin spots in the cloud deck. Meanwhile the fuzzy mammatus bags were subtly cast in a greenish hue -- the … [Read more...]

Colorado Crawlers

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As night fell across the Great Plains of eastern Colorado, what had been a fairly amorphous, high-based band of thunderstorms latched onto a moist low level jet and organized quickly.  Lightning filaments began flying every which way under the trailing rain and anvil canopy of the thunderstorm cluster, putting forth a show of "crawler" lightning that rivaled that of many larger, better-organized … [Read more...]

Illuminalia

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Those (things or events) that illuminate—that's how the title would translate from Latin.  How simply fitting it is, then, to describe this sunset scene which blessed us at the end of what had been a fairly underperforming storm day in the Great Plains of eastern Colorado.  More was yet to come, too, in the form of a wonderful electrical display in the opposite half of the sky. 3 ESE Ft. Morgan … [Read more...]