SkyPix

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

Window to Color

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Twilight on the High Plains can be an experience simultaneously soothing and awe-inspiring. We had finished a grand day of storm observing and photography, and were headed for Cheyenne and food and lodging.  Quickly, a window of splendor opened in convective clouds to our southwest.  Then nearly as rapidly, another window closed, unseen in the northwestern sky behind the heavy shadows overhead.  … [Read more...]

Headed past Headrick

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What had been a wet classic supercell seemed to gust out as it merged with other, smaller cells, but instead organized a very intense, rain-wrapped mesocyclone and surged eastward past Headrick.  In this view, the arc of the rear-flank gust front is in the foreground, wrapping back into a dark, hidden, dangerous mesocyclone region.  Any unfortunate persons hiking on those granite hills without … [Read more...]

Towering Cumulus and High Country Foliage

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At 9,000 feet high in the Colorado mountains, deep convective clouds and brilliantly peaking fall aspens are an uncommon combination to witness.  Still, the passing of a mid-upper level trough over seasonally warm and moist conditions for the area produced this outstanding high-country vista—a summertime sky over a decidedly autumnal landscape. 6 S South Fork CO (28 Sep 12) Looking … [Read more...]

Path of Least Resistance

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Sometimes the path of least resitance is quite far from a straight line, visually inefficient to us but quite plausible for the atmosphere.  This shot shows that, and also, proves lightning doesn't have to seek the tallest point.  Someone standing near the top of the mountain here wouldn't have been hurt,  though he might have gotten quite a fright from the passage of 30,000 amperes of electricity … [Read more...]

Pyroconvective Plume

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This view of the "Noble" fire plume (most of which by then was in far east Norman) and its towering pyrocumulus formation (a subset of the flammagenitus cloud type), was from 10 miles away at the National Weather Center.  As dozens of structures burned, hundreds of people evacuated, and many miles of rural township/range grid roads closed, including the main east-west artery through the area … [Read more...]

Tornadic Marionette

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Happy birthday to me!  This was the second, and most photogenic, of at least three tornadoes that I witnessed from a supercell interacting with an outflow boundary--my first birthday tornadoes in over a quarter-century of active storm observing.  It was no easy feat, either, given the hilly and sometimes forested terrain of this part of southeastern Oklahoma.  Fortunately, we found an open-field … [Read more...]