SkyPix

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

North Platte Valley Funnel

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Swirling along a cyclonic-shear zone east of the main mesocyclone, a funnel cloud swirls for a couple minutes over the North Platte River Valley and Nebraska Panhandle prairies.   No dust or debris appeared with this funnel, one of several we saw on this remarkable storm-intercept day.   A separate storm over an hour later produced another funnel cloud, visible to the WSW from very near this … [Read more...]

Parting Kiss from Patricia

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Several of the most brilliantly chromatic sunset displays I've seen have been on the west side of high-cloud shields produced by tropical cyclones; this incredibly textured stunner ranks right up there.  A deeply granular cloud shield, spawned over Mexico by what was left of Hurricane Patricia, blew northeastward through our wide and wondrous sky.  Red rays of day's end shone through a thin slit … [Read more...]

Hell on Wheeler

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The skies over the town and county of Wheeler (Texas) lit up on this energetic night of electrical mayhem.  After clouds on its backside contributed to a grand sundown, a complex of thunderstorms spat forth a fascinating array of lightning channels as it departed the area, some of which were sampled by this short exposure.  The closer, forked strike occurred in only light rain of the trailing … [Read more...]

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...]