SkyPix

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

High Cirrus over Glacial Lake

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Yes, cirrus can be beautiful!  This is a large, classical example of cirrus uncinus—otherwise known as "mare's tail"—framing itself handsomely over the cattails and windblown surface of a glacial kettle lake on South Dakota's plains.  The photographic day that began with this marvelous formation concluded with a picturesque sunset supercell, and three other rotating storms in between...all the … [Read more...]

Pleasant Little Tornado

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That title is true.  This storm intercept was logistically smooth and conformed well to my pre-departure forecast, with a few positively reinforcing nowcast calls from Elke and from Matt Biddle (pre-"smartphone" era).  Those factors allowed me to drive 250 miles right to the storm initiation zone, then to track visually—with no onboard radar—early towers evolving into a well-structured supercell … [Read more...]

Double-Decker Shelf with Pileus

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Wyoming weather can change ever so fast.  Less than an hour before, only a few high based, fuzzy and amorphous looking showers, with terrible definition, littered the sky under a canopy of high clouds produced by separate storms in the Bighorn Mountains.  After heading east from Buffalo to Gillette, we turned around to be greeted by a wild and wicked western sky painted slate, cyan and turquoise … [Read more...]

Sundown on Two Great Lakes

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Earth rotates our nearest star below the horizon again, this time across the waters of two Great Lakes.  I shot this among a sequence of photos looking beyond and beneath the Mackinac Bridge (unseen, above), thereby shooting across the combined body of Lakes Huron (near) and Michigan (far).  Already distorted by differential refracting of the light through a long fetch of atmosphere, … [Read more...]

Inundation Conquest

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The abandonment of this farmstead long predated its inundation by a rising glacial-relic lake.  The flood simply makes the place even more of a "fixer-upper"!  Although water tables have been rising naturally for several years in much of eastern North Dakota and northeastern South Dakota, heavy spring rains and snowmelt in 2011 boosted that process enormously.  To the southwest, Roscoe's sewage … [Read more...]

Shaw Lake Reflections

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Golden aspens of a Colorado high-country autumn, and the cumulus-decorated blue sky above, fluidly alternated their reflections off the waters of Shaw Lake in the San Juan Mountains.  This surreal, abstract scene was astoundingly straightforward to shoot too:  enlarge ISO to enable fast shutter speed and high f-stop, point the camera at the rippled water, zoom in to the desired section, focus on … [Read more...]