SkyPix

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

Olympic Coast: Sunset in Wet Sand

By

One unusual but uniquely pacifying way to view a sunset is by enchanting oneself with its reflections, ever-changing waves and currents offering a view of the colorful evolution of two fluids at once.  Here, the water coats and washes over beach sand while offering rippled, quicksilver-toned mirroring of the northwestern sky.  While the handful of other photographers were aiming upward and … [Read more...]

Ragged Bowl

By

The previous circulation of the Hollister storm undermined itself with outflow, but another brief, well-defined wall cloud quickly developed.  It also quickly dissipated, falling victim to the same outflow surge that doomed the prior attempt.  Regardless, in its couple minutes of existence, this modestly rotating, scuddy, bowl-shaped wall cloud earned due attention. 7 SSE Hollister OK (10 Apr … [Read more...]

Teetering

By

This little old barn was listing eastward for years, inch by inch, somehow still somewhat upright, even in the face of the bitter northwest winds of winter that prodded it in the direction of its ultimate demise, and the cycles of freezes and thaws that pried its bindings and joints ever more loose.  The structure's downfall came in a severe downburst the following June. Norman, OK (1 Feb 11) … [Read more...]

Cyclonic Shear Zone

By

After a rather small and inefficient first attempt, the succeeding mesocyclonic organization of this storm got a little beefier.   The entire convective cluster undermined itself with outflow for over an hour, but not so much as to cut off its own inflow completely.  By the time the main updraft reorganized, almost directly over US-70 in southwestern Oklahoma, it formed a long, ragged, yet … [Read more...]

Lunar Corona

By

A broken, diffuse altocumulus deck put on a colorful show of nocturnal atmospheric optics during the cool, pre-dawn hours.  Coronas come to the eye by means of optical diffraction (bending of light) through small water droplets of the clouds.  I enjoyed this corona more than most because the cloud layer moving quickly and was nonuniform—in fact, quite chunky—imparting some welcome, ever-changing … [Read more...]

Birth of a Wall Cloud

By

Beyond the gypsum and dolomite strings in Permian redbeds, beyond the lonesome Plains highway's hilltop, a nascent supercell emerged from the rim of a messy thunderstorm cluster to develop the first scuddy shreds of a wall cloud, within a persistent inflow notch.  As often is the case, this initial mesocyclonic gestation failed to give birth to a tornado, or even a sustained low-level rotation … [Read more...]