SkyPix

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

West Thumb Colors

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Hot water pours into Yellowstone Lake from one of the main drainages of the West Thumb Geyser Basin, colorful bacteria and minerals staining the underlying beach in ochre tones.  A band of thunderstorms had moved through rather rapidly within the preceding hour, and by this time already passed the Absaroka Mountains in the distance, leaving behind a clean, chaotic and beautiful sky. Yellowstone … [Read more...]

Patricia Tornado

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This remarkable thunderstorm already had rewarded us for a very long day's drive from central Oklahoma by showing spectacular supercell structures, which continued here as a nifty bell-bottom shape to the main updraft region.  Normally with a supercell this high-based, carrying a nearly laminar cloud skirt with a rain-wrapped mesocyclone beneath, I wouldn't expect to see a tornado emerge within … [Read more...]

Sparking Sky

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I had spent half an hour taking nondescript, distant CG (cloud-to-ground) lightning pictures in the Osage Hills.  The location was almost surrounded by thunderstorms, whose anvils had aggregated together and become increasingly charged.  Then, a sudden explosion of cloud-to-air and cloud-to-cloud filaments filled the sky--including directly overhead!  This photo thru a 50-mm lens shows only a … [Read more...]

Flash with Fireball

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After the Red Halo shot, we reeled off a few more CG-over-landscape photos with the encroaching, increasingly outflow-dominant supercell.  The electrical action and cores started getting nearer also—too close after this CG blew up something flammable on the next hillside to our SW.  For an instant, an orange fireball ignited, and its glow is captured here along with the lightning strike.  … [Read more...]

Wyoming Storm Ending

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After a great day of Devils Tower photography, storm observing and good food, we headed out of Newcastle in search of a wonderful Wyoming sunset.  It found us here.  An isolated, elevated thunderstorm formed to our SW behind the earlier complex and moved eastward, intercepting the lowering rays of sunlight as it dissipated.  A faint secondary rainbow formed to the right of the main one, and a nice … [Read more...]

Yellowstone Mudpot Freeze-Frame

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The Fountain Paint Pots at Yellowstone, along with the Hverir mudpots in Iceland, are two of the most consistently outstanding formations of their kind in the world.  Magma a short distance underground heats water to beyond the boiling point, but it stays liquid due to pressure.  In both cases, nearby geysers vent much of that water through outburst fountains, but some of the water travels through … [Read more...]