SkyPix

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

Oklahoma Panhandle Did It Today!

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For hours, this dryline-born storm puttered erratically north-northeastward across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles as a high-based multicell and weak supercell, seemingly allergic to the concept of robust organization.  We got disgusted by its poor structure and seeming impotence in spite of favorable deep shear, and left just before sunset to aim for the next day's presumed target area in … [Read more...]

Orange Sky

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Blazing across the twilight sky above Kansas City's city hall, a supercell-spawned show of flaming-orange mammatus signals the end of a stormy day.  The stormy evening, however, was just beginning, as the supercell became elevated with a marvelous lightning show across areas north of the Missouri River. Kansas City MO (25 Jun 94) Looking NNW 39.0996, -94.5789   … [Read more...]

Mosquero Gust Front

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Quaint and quirky, the friendly old High Plains burg of Mosquero, NM, temporarily hosted a supercell on this tumultuous late-spring afternoon, a storm that had sported a classical wall cloud and mesocyclone region shortly before the outflow-dominant phase seen here entering town.  A profuse, vegetation-shredding hail dump soon would follow, leaving eerie scenes in its wake rather uncharacteristic … [Read more...]

Altus Crawlers

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Darkness ruled the night.  Then, for just a second or two, from one node of intense charge separation high in the sky, and hidden behind an intervening chunk of midlevel clouds, filaments of electricity erupted in several directions at once, crawling at lightning speed along the underside of the storm's anvil.  Back into the dark we stood, until the next fleeting burst of atmospheric pyrotechnics … [Read more...]

Winter Wonderland, Oklahoma

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The winter of 1987–1988 was notable in Norman for several heavy snowfalls of around a foot.  Being a man of the lower latitudes, I only remember such otherwise miserable cold-weather events for their occasionally beautiful results, like this shot of the duck pond at Brandt Park.  Who says Oklahoma doesn't have major winter weather? Norman OK (Jan 88) Looking ENE 35.2059, -97.4364 … [Read more...]

Nebraska Arcus: West

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Some arcus or shelf clouds have laminar, smooth banding that occurs when the cold pool forces upward a layer of relatively stable air at that level.  Others, such as this one, are more convective, or bubbly and rolling in character, the lifted air being unstable.  [Here is a view of the east side of the same formation.]  Scientifically and aesthetically, this was a marvelous process to behold.  … [Read more...]