SkyPix

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

Stacked Cars from Above

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The previous Hurricane Andrew damage slide looked at these cars up close from the side, while this bird's-eye perspective peers down from 13 stories aloft.  Even though this seemingly freak phenomenon occurred outside Andrew's maximum winds, it's a result of Bernoulli's principle:  a decrease in the fluid's pressure and/or potential energy (such as forced by an obstacle) is accompanied by an … [Read more...]

Trinity Sunset Sky

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Just a short few minutes after realizing one of my dream shots of downtown Dallas, the western sky erupted in blazing color.  The sunset illuminated a field of mammatus lining the outer cloud shield of a departing storm complex—the same one that added another citywide torrent of runoff to an already flood-swollen Trinity River.  With a sunset like this on one side, and on the other, America's best … [Read more...]

A Dallas Reflective

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For many years—since childhood there, actually—I had been imagining a warm-season sunset shot of the Dallas skyline from the northwest,  framed by orange clouds and the flooded Trinity River, and the right circumstances finally juxtaposed.   Our chase day was a wet slop heap of rain-embedded mesocyclones and fuzzy features farther south, absorbed by a big complex of storms.  The back side of those … [Read more...]

Tempest Highway

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Downhill is the easy road, unless it leads directly into a maelstrom of severe wind and large hail!  We were glad to have a high-quality crossroad behind us leading to the left and ahead of the looming pall of destructive outflow.  Despite the imminent danger, we were kept this long by the alluring beauty of a tiered shelf cloud catching indirect sunlight from the eastern sky, shortly before … [Read more...]

Flames of Lightning 2

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The lightning-started fire burned on and on through the twilight hour, and also through grass, scrub brush and dry,oily cedars, all the while resisting multiple efforts by local fire departments to extinguish the inferno.  We could see distant flashing lights of the fire vehicles periodically heading out from San Jon to the blaze, making little impact, while a plume of smoke wafted northeastward … [Read more...]

Flames of Lightning 1

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These scenes have a little of a lot:  cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, a decaying wet downburst (background), the remnants of a high-based wall cloud and tail cloud, and a lightning-started fire with a smoke plume as viewed from the 4900' Caprock overlook in northeast New Mexico.  The flames persisted for at least an hour before fire trucks arrived and another hour or more afterward.  Next is a … [Read more...]