SkyPix

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

Evening Interaction

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So much was going on here that it was a saturation of fascination!  In the pastel twilight, a laminar shelf cloud—corresponding to the above-surface part of a rear-flank gust front from a supercell off the right side—interacted with the forward-flank region of a trailing supercell, whose base and tilted updrafts can be seen at left.  Right above this interaction:  intense flickering of … [Read more...]

Quartet with Quarter

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Under late-afternoon sunlight, the shoulder of a Colorado dirt road forms a fine backdrop to exhibit the complex structures of four severe hailstones that had fallen about an hour earlier, with partial melting since.  I had mined these from some nearby grass, which tends to keep the hail elevated above relatively warm ground and into a shallow layer of hail-refrigerated air.  This preserves the … [Read more...]

Deep Sunset Zoom

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Even past the peak of overhead colors, sunset scenes can take on a rich, naturally saturated depth when using a long zoom lens to extend the field of view deep into the reddened western sky.  This makes an already amazing Oklahoma sunset erupt with fiery tones and highlights distant cloud textures we might not notice otherwise in the broader perspective. Norman, OK (24 Jan 15) Looking … [Read more...]

Ute Reservoir Surrounded by Snow

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Flying over the High Plains of eastern New Mexico in midwinter yielded one uncommon sight: a snowfield surrounding a large reservoir in semi-arid countryside.  I was amazed that Ute Reservoir still had as much water as it did.  As for the snow, not only did it make for a starkly beautiful highlighter for the little canyons and arroyos that drain into the lake, but with this area in a prolonged … [Read more...]

Early Millsap Tornado

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After a great show of supercellular structure, the Millsap storm got messy and rainy, but a surprise emerged within that rain—a nicely formed cone tornado.  When the surrounding precipitation thinned a bit, the tornado's debris fan became visible (here), and its parent wall cloud had been cut and occluded to a size not much broader than the top of the condensation funnel.  Fortunately this tornado … [Read more...]

Natural Paint Puddle

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Boiling volcanic mud in the Hverir geothermal area paints a wondrous abstraction of concentric bands and contours, shifting and distorting with each new upwelling, evoking a fluid topographic map or a shape-shifting field of scientific isopleths. 3 E Skutustadahreppur, Iceland (22 Aug 14) Looking ESE 65.6417, -16.8098 … [Read more...]