SkyPix

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

Electric Scythe in the Sky

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Fingers of deadly amperage extend most of the way groundward from their source high in the middle to upper levels of an oncoming thunderstorm.   Most such "crawlers" extend horizontally for many miles, but somehow this path of least resistance led almost to the surface. 3 SSW Altus, OK (26 April 14) Looking NW 34.5953, -99.3516 … [Read more...]

Wave Reflections at Sunset

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A wonderful sunset sky of western orange and overhead indigo reflected off the lake's surface as abstract art in motion. This was a scene when I spent as much time looking down as up, despite my innate urge to gaze skyward. Much of the wonderment there wasn't only in the colors or the light effects, but also, in the nearly hypnotic blinking of cool and warm glows, at random, across the view. If I … [Read more...]

Blowing off Steam

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Sulfurous vapors hiss forth from cobbled vents and waft ceaselessly across the denuded countryside of Hverir, a geothermal area associated with past fissure eruptions in Iceland's Krafla volcanic system. Where relatively lacking of people, and when looking certain directions, these lands offer a primordial time travel into the blistering furnaces of the Earth surface's formation. 3 E … [Read more...]

Ice Tree Coming after You

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Rising from the tangled mess of an ice storm, this creepy tree assumes a menacing pose, as if a predatory monster looming overhead, ready to snatch us up and commit unspoken and unspeakable evil.  Fortunately for nightmare-prone children the world over, this tree remained exactly as it looked, frozen in place, with the glint of sunlight refracting through the icy crust encasing every twig, … [Read more...]

KC Mammatus Returns

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Almost a year after the skies of downtown Kansas City treated me to their first show of supercell-spawned mammatus clouds, this encore presentation proved history can repeat. The situation was a little different, with an HP (heavy-precip) supercell WSW of town instead of NW, but the photography location, cloud type, storm type, solar time and bedazzlement factor all were identical. Kansas City MO … [Read more...]

Stratocumulus Billows

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Undulating ripples, regularly spaced and orderly, seem out of place in a chaotic atmosphere.  They're fairly common, though!  Billow clouds can form at many different levels in the troposphere, and are related to wind shear. Here, the stratocumulus undulatus billows were trapped under a low-level temperature inversion.  The cloudy areas represent weak rising motion of a sheet of air, condensing … [Read more...]