SkyPix

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

Hailstone in a Hailstone

By

Holding up a variably translucent hailstone to bright light can exhibit some fascinating and curious textures and elements, including the opaque core that anchored the formation of clear surrounding ice here. This was one of numerous similar stones, rounded on the edges but flattened to gently curved on the sides, that fell from a severe, heavy-precip (HP) supercell. See Bigger than Bicentennial … [Read more...]

Bruarfoss Blue

By

Bruarfoss is not one of the "touristy" falls in Iceland and takes some effort to reach--a hike along an unmarked and muddy trail from a dirt back road, in a remote country neighborhood--and as such, can be enjoyed with no other company.  You know we did.  The effort to get there is forgotten when one reaches the river, and as if by magic, this staggering scene opens wide before bulging eyes and … [Read more...]

Convective Tower Shadowing Smoke

By

Towering cumulus created a strange and eerily beautiful visual effect, shadowing boundary-layer smoke that had wafted 125 miles from the Cow Camp fire in Wyoming. That 6,000-acre blaze started a few days earlier in the Medicine Bow National Forest NW of Wheatland WY, and sent pulses of dense smoke skyward. Southwesterlies behind the dryline carried the smoke to the northwestern part of the … [Read more...]

Two Mesocyclones and a CG at Sunset

By

This complex convective cluster had a lot to offer the attentive observer!  A wall cloud and weak mesocyclone headed eastward with the more northern, distant updraft, still accessing somewhat undisturbed inflow from the more precip-infused nearer storm.   The latter sported a vigorously rotating cloud base in the foreground, around which copious rain and probably some hail were orbiting.  Te spin … [Read more...]

No Volcanoes in Oklahoma

By

On a hot, windy day, this is not what any rural resident wishes to see through the trees. Since Oklahoma doesn't have volcanoes, the nature of this flammagenitus cloud formation (big pyrocumulus, atop a smoke plume) was easy to guess on a record-hot summer day.  Pyrocumulus formation would continue through the rest of daylight. Though the fire stayed a few miles east of us, it immediately … [Read more...]