SkyPix

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

Ragged Rotation

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We had been positioned within a couple miles of this spot for nearly an hour as a supercell approached, watching mostly disorganized wall clouds come and go with no more than weak rotation.  A larger, newer mesocyclone was forming farther east, as the parent supercell moved into richer moisture, but we stayed a little longer.  This was why:  an older, occluded circulation seemed to latch onto more … [Read more...]

A Sterling Sunset

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Combine a sporadically cloudy western area where the light originates, and deeply textured, multi-layered eastern view of rain, storm clouds, and scud, all bouncing photons every which way, yielding layers of direct and diffused sunset light and partial, cool-toned shadowing.  The result?  A splash of pastels hurled across the sky in the form of a fluid, abstract painting.  What a privilege and … [Read more...]

Smoky Supercell with Older Sibling

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This was not only a weird scene, but one with a lot happening.  As the "Roswell Mothership" storm shrunk a little and raised its cloud base, it still remained decidedly surface-based.  We know this because it can be seen here at right, ingesting a plume of smoke from a grass fire that had been started by its own lightning.  That, combined with some subtle differences in cloud shadowing, cast a … [Read more...]

CG and Anvil Crawlers

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Decades later, this is still one of my all-time personal favorites, mainly because of the variety of lightning on display:  a split-channel CG strike, along with a mixture of connected and disconnected "anvil crawlers."  These natural pyrotechnics blazed through a region of light rain trailing a mesoscale convective system (MCS), which was moving SSE away from the scene.  There is no place better … [Read more...]

Multicell Storm from Torrington – 2

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Intense, tilted, twin updraft plumes pumped countless kilotons of moisture into a storm complex along the Wyoming-Nebraska state line, just a few minutes after the last shot.   It was well worth a delay in dinner.  Even though we were getting rather hungry for tangible food, this magnificent rampart of convective resplendence was satiating our annual (and ceaselessly voracious) springtime appetite … [Read more...]

Multicell Storm from Torrington – 1

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Cruising into Torrington after a decent afternoon of storm observing and landscape photography up near Lusk, we intended to meet with a group of friends for dinner in town.  Fortunately they, too, are storm observers, and understood perfectly why we were delayed until near the end of their meal:  this magnificent eruption of convection near the Nebraska border, brilliantly illuminated by the last … [Read more...]