SkyPix

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

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...]

Laminar Decks

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Firing off the southern rim of the Sangre de Cristo range, this storm spent fascinating interludes both in somewhat outflow-dominant form and as a classical, sculpted supercell, before heaving forth a large pile of rain and outflow.  That last act nearly finished the storm off, but for a persistent area of midlevel rotation that lasted until it could catch one last gasp of nearly surface-based … [Read more...]

Cracks on the Cauldron Wall

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A stark and foreboding scene slowly erupted across the lava fields of Kalapana, as if the edges of hell itself were pushing out of its constraining walls.  Splitting, crackling and heaving upward with the slowly expansive downhill thrust of the flow, the rigid crust parts to reveal glimpses of a far larger 2,000-degree cauldron.   The radiative heat was a welcomed source of comfort against the … [Read more...]

Twilight on the Platte

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Just a short while earlier, as a band of storms passed to the east, we had enjoyed the flight of thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese across a rainbow-decorated sky.  After dealing with a rough weather day of cold wind, then late storms, followed by a cold front, the cranes didn't arrive en masse for their river roosting until deeper into the twilight, when light levels were very low and … [Read more...]