SkyPix

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

Seibert Sparks

By

A lonely, rolling dirt road on the High Plains seems to lead to one destiny:  a severe storm with a chambered, striated cloud texture, darkening the western sky at afternoon's end and flinging hot little filaments of electricity to and fro, as if to remind the captivated observer not to lose attention.  To its immediate north, and just off-view at right, distant sunset colors peeked under laminar … [Read more...]

Geothermal Steam Cloud

By

A strange cumulus-like cloud column appears to rise straight from a landscape of craggy, sharp lava rocks.  The rocks are real, but they are the rim of a crater within which steam is generated, every day, all day, year-round—part of the Gunnuhver geothermal area on the southwestern peninsula of Iceland.   I loved the background slate-blue tones of a maritime subarctic sky subtly infused with … [Read more...]

Mammatus over a Sandhills Highway

By

A large field of cumulonimbus mammatus streams east from a supercell unseen to the left, high over the Great Plains vastness of the Nebraska Sandhills.  With the vegetatively stabilized dunes impeding any consistently good views beneath the storm's base, we had to be content appreciating with this sight, fantastic in its own right, until the supercell drew closer. 13 S Hyannis NE (11 Jun 7) … [Read more...]

Scorpion Stinger Tornado

By

Underneath some striking supercell structure, the Phillips tornado's condensation funnel evolved swiftly from a stubby bump to this contorted form resembling the painful end of a scorpion.  The small debris cloud beneath the "stinger" confirmed its status as full tornado.  Although this vortex wasn't very long-lived, it would have made a fine finale for a productive storm-observing day, just on … [Read more...]

Hay Bales in the Snow

By

Here was a cold but peaceful farm scene, two days after central Oklahoma's Christmas Eve blizzard of 2009.  The more sheltered hay bales at rear sported snow caps, unlike the better-exposed bale close by.  Obstacle flow around the solo bale scoured out the dry moat in the snow.  The resulting patch of visible ground actually was teardrop-shaped, bigger on the right than on the left because the … [Read more...]

Sparky View from the Dock

By

A heavy-precipitation (HP) supercell sloshed off into the distance, leaving behind refreshingly cool and moist air, a more robustly filled reservoir, some internally lit mammatus clouds, and one very nicely forked strike between its upper reaches and some distant several square inches of ground. The tan-orange glow on the water and cattails came from sodium vapor streetlights that illuminated the … [Read more...]