SkyPix

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

Spotlit Downburst

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A persistent hole in the outflow-lifted clouds, ahead of  a broken squall line, allowed sunshine to spotlight an area of rugged hills and rain above, between Bullhead City and Kingman, as a locally severe downburst descended into its valleys and outward across the desert floor.   The shafts of sunlight shifted upward off the terrain and more into the core, as the outflow clouds evolved and locally … [Read more...]

Evening at Anaehoomalu Beach

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After a "voggy" sunset, it was time to time-expose the warm, tropical Pacific waters lapping against lava.  Fortunately, unlike videos, photographs aren't accompanied by contemporaneous sound; for there was a loud luau booming across the bay from a nearby resort.  Would you have guessed based on the scene alone?  Being big-city born and raised, the noise was rather easy to block out and prevent … [Read more...]

Hawaiian Snow Slope

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In the distance, the tropical Pacific boundary layer hosts placid, warm cumulus clouds, while in the Hawaiian foreground:  snow!  A few times during any given winter, with the passage of a midlatitude middle-level trough, the freezing levels lower well below its 13,803-foot summit while precipitation rolls over, and the top few hundred to couple thousand feet of Mauna Kea wears a snow cap.  Even … [Read more...]

Caution: Tornado Crossing

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Yes, Dorothy, we're back in Kansas.  This classic prairie tornado formed less than 30 seconds before crossing a lonely gravel section road southwest of Stockton.  Right as it did, the condensation funnel first contacted ground, although the tornadic circulation probably was fully in place just before.  [Remember, tornadoes don't "touch down"!  In fact the air in them is rising.]  We had turned … [Read more...]

Bright Bolt and Filaments beyond Mesa

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On a night when occasional blasts of lightning lit deep convective clouds in every other direction, north was not to be left out.  Although the bottom part of the main discharge couldn't be seen beyond the near edge of a long mesa, the "eyeball test" suggested what lightning-detection data soon confirmed:  this was a cloud-to-ground stroke.  Numerous other filaments danced in assorted directions … [Read more...]

Electric Rain

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Two nearly simultaneous cloud-to-ground strokes (CGs) blasted through the eastern New Mexico twilight, from a high-based band of storms, one of which spent a couple of stints as a supercell during the previous several hours.  The CG at left was embedded deeper in the rain core, its brightness muted variably by differing intervening densities of rain.  At right, the brighter stroke was not … [Read more...]