SkyPix

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

Wind Farm Tornado: Getting Organized

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Several tornadoes into this supercell's lifetime, one of which I had seen dissipate before reaching the ridge, a big new wall cloud seemed to devour the turbines at right.  Yet a new menace—in the form of a separate multivortex tornado at lower left—was forming directly amongst another part of the Blue Canyon Wind Farm.  I had arrived late to this NE-moving storm, which turned out to be a blessing … [Read more...]

Shimmering Sea

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The rising, midmorning sun shone across this narrow arm of the northern sea, dimming two separate decks of cloud in the distance:  lighter stratus down low and darker altostratus above and beyond.  Yet my eyes gazed intently across the small waves and their the constant, vast sparkle of the sun's reflections.  It was an ever-changing gallery of thousands of points of light, each one quickly … [Read more...]

Deep HP Churn

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While Elke and I still were eating lunch in Roswell, this storm formed on the open desert plains north of the Capitan Mountains to our NW, then became a supercell right before it scraped across the east side of El Capitan, evolving into a dark, menacing, heavy-precipitation (HP) brute.  We first intercepted the storm there and stair-stepped ahead of it steadily as it churned southeastward past … [Read more...]

Tornado and Loop Vortex

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As the significant Canadian tornado slowly narrowed, two scuddy, filamentous funnels in the near upper foreground quickly formed and merged, while orbiting the main mesocyclone from left to right.  Within less than 10 seconds, the feature coiled into a distorted rope and vanished.  It's impossible to say if the loop vortex formed a closed toroid inside the cloud aloft, but in such a turbulent, … [Read more...]

Wall Cloud and Wildflowers

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Treat yourself to mesocyclonic eye candy, courtesy of a midafternoon supercell which formed near Anton, NW of Lubbock.  There's nothing quite like a wall cloud and wildflowers to complement any story of the Great Plains!  Note the low-hanging tail cloud extending NNE (rightward), from the wall cloud to the top of the rain foot produced by the intense core at right.  Rain-cooled air was being drawn … [Read more...]