SkyPix

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

Old Blowdown Forensics

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Let's do a little forensic meteorology standing here on Missouri's highest point, on Tom Sauk "Mountain" (in quotes since it is less than 2,000 feet).  These trees obviously blew down at some point a few years ago -- not so many as to rot away in this moist climate, but not so recently that fresh wood was still visible, as with another blowdown seen in New England a few years earlier.  How long?  … [Read more...]

Bears Watch

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In the 1980s and part of the '90s, a forecaster in Brownsville would add the term, "Bears watch," to any potentially troublesome weather scenario described in a forecast discussion.  While then it looked like an amusing quirk, that concern remains valid when dealing with any rotating wall cloud that has scuddy lowerings rising off the ground.  In this case, motion was only very slowly rotational … [Read more...]

Near-Sunset Double Rainbow

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[Click Image to Enlarge] Panoramas capture double rainbows at their fullest and grandest, at no time more so than just before sunset, when the bows are as near to a half-semicircle at ground level as possible.  This near the end of the solar day, the entire rainbow reddens and yellows in the warm light, along with the rest of the sky and landscape.  That renders the purple and blue inner parts … [Read more...]

Framed Iridescence

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Much too early in the day for sunset light, these colors peeking through a cloud gap suggested just one thing:  iridescence (which can manifest as many colors).  Somehow, direct sunlight caught small pieces of midlevel clouds at higher elevations than the larger fractocumulus, towering cumulus, and nimbostratus.  The sea of  intervening clouds parted long enough, just a minute, to create a window … [Read more...]

Close Boom

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Flash to thunder, less than a second elapsed.  That percussion was intense, too -- very loud, stereoscopically door-slamming type of boom, felt as much as heard.  It was past time to go back inside.  With the benefit of a later close-up examination of this image, the contact area could be located behind both the red-roofed building and the first tree at its rear, but ahead of the next trees to the … [Read more...]

Quinter Blow

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Quinter and its vicinity are best known among storm chasers for a series of tornadoes almost 18 years earlier, on a day I couldn't head out due to having an evening shift.    So with me, a long history of intercepting destructive bows and outflow-dominant supercells in northwestern Kansas has earned it a reputation for ridiculously severe thunderstorm winds -- few manifesting more picturesque than … [Read more...]