SkyPix

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

The Beauty of Patricia

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This magnificent supercell hurled hailstones bigger than baseballs and spawned at least three tornadoes while spinning its way across the southernmost fringes of the Great Plains, between Midland and Lubbock.  Maybe we could have sampled the hail, or gotten a little closer to two of the tornadoes we saw, but the experience of this scene alone leaves absolutely no regrets.  We drove over a thousand … [Read more...]

Tufa Towers

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Crusty pillars of calcium carbonate, known as tufa, stand out above the level of the lake that once submerged them.  These towers are hollow, formed as warm mineral water entered the cold lake, depositing its load of previously dissolved lime in the process. Mono is a highly alkaline and salty lake that occupies part of a downdropped graben—a desert basin between the Sierra Nevada and the White … [Read more...]

Sandy Shore at Sundown

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A persistent drought lowered the level of Lake Thunderbird over eight feet below normal by fall 2006, which set new records for the reservoir.  This exposed a wide swath of sand that typically is submerged, along with woody remains of small trees that grew several decades ago before impoundment.  The drop in lake levels also made conditions good for beachcombing, sand-walking, scavenger hunts with … [Read more...]

Stream Cutting Snowy Scrublands

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The Canadian River, downstream from Ute Reservoir, has dissected the Great Plains scrublands over many millennia and carried particles of what once was caprock-clad Ogallala formation to the Louisiana coast.  This unusual aerial perspective catches a fine geomorphology laboratory frozen, both in time and in a blanket of fresh snow that the otherwise parched landscape sorely needed. over San Jon … [Read more...]

Spencer SD Tornado

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The big tornado at bottom center of this wide-angle, 35-mm slide had passed over the photo location about 10 minutes earlier—a glacial-era kettle lake, whipped to whitecaps by the trailing rear-flank downdraft (RFD) and strewn with small debris.  The rain-diffused rays of the setting Dakota sun cast aglow the scud tags in the high foreground, as they raced southward (left-to-right) around the west … [Read more...]

Snow Shafts in City Lights

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Just three months before, I crouched under sea grape trees in the Florida Keys for a long exposure of the distant glow of Greater Miami.  Now, 1,751 miles farther northwest, one mile higher and around 50 degrees (F) colder, a much less-distant urban glow lit up a series of small snow showers and their attendant, collective cloud field so brilliantly that only a few seconds' exposure was needed to … [Read more...]