SkyPix

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

Colorado Crackle

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The trailing portion of a band of high-based thunderstorms slowly became more photogenic as it swept eastward across the Colorado plains, and its outflow constructed a shallow arcus cloud. Then, as so often happens on the edge of a core, including earlier with the same convective cluster, a cloud-to-ground stroke split the sky and sent waves of thunder booming across the High Plains. 2 S Woodrow … [Read more...]

Sheridan Lake Non-Tornado

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[Part 3 of 4] As the Sheridan Lake storm complex of 2011 churned southeastward, blasting waves of outflow into the back side of its gust front, one particularly intense wind channel reached a very dry, plowed field. This stirred up a miniature Dust Bowl, visually imitating the debris cloud of a funnel-deprived tornado. Of course, the cloud base above wasn't rotating, and the dust plume dispersed … [Read more...]

Roof Lightning

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From the roof of the National Weather Center, we cast a wide gaze across the breadth of the OU campus and the city of Norman.  A dazzling montage fills the northern sky:  a high-based multicell thunderstorm, its cloud base subtly tinted by the filtered tones of the sunset light, the internal convective generator blasting forth a big spark to punctuate and bracket the scene.  This was a welcomed … [Read more...]

Submerged Road Paint

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At first glance, one would surmise, "Lake Texoma isn't supposed to be covering this freshly paved and painted roadway." Oh yes, it is -- at least when it reaches near-record high levels. The road curves across a wide, grassy, earthen floodway that leads to the lake's emergency spillway, south of Denison Dam. The floodway stays dry the overwhelming majority of the time, and even contains … [Read more...]

Spray Falls, Lake Superior

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Most waterfalls erode themselves well upriver from the terminus of their streams, instead of unloading right at the mouth.  Spray Falls, which empties Spray Creek into Lake Superior, is a wonderfully picturesque exception.  It shoots 70 feet directly off the edge of the hard, resistant, Precambrian sandstone cliffs, within Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  The cliffs themselves erode shoreward … [Read more...]

Smoky Okie Sunset

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A fine afternoon of driving, hiking, picnic-eating, and wildlife observation with my kids concluded with one of the strangest sunsets in awhile, seen from high up the west slope of Mount Scott. Even though 2007 had been a wet year, a fire somewhere on Fort Sill property spread smoke through the late-day skies of the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge. Wisps and ribbons of the smoke slowly … [Read more...]