SkyPix

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

Dryland Sundown

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A little over an hour after an ethereal show of crepuscular rays a couple miles to the west, the remaining cloud debris and rain from dying storms moving off the Sangre de Cristo Mountains gave us a pleasant High Plains sunset.  This part of the Great Plains often finds itself behind the dryline, with spring precipitation mainly confined to early synoptic lows digging south of the area and forcing … [Read more...]

Arcus over More Badlands Grasslands

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As a tiered shelf cloud roared into the Badlands, not far from a dilapidated ghost town called Scenic, its northern portion made quite the scenic scene beyond the verdant fields atop the High Plains landscape.  About a hundred yards away, hobbling quickly on a pulled calf muscle from a slip in the mud in Chadron two days before, I positioned for the radically different, yet equally cherished, … [Read more...]

Night Supercell Blowout

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The last vestiges of a city-lit nighttime supercell's tiered, stacked structure translated across the near northeastern sky, as its outflow rushed out to choke off remaining inflow.   Within 10 minutes, the rear-flank gust front had roared past, rendering refreshingly cool northerly winds, while the storm lost what little lightning it still had been producing in the main core, then soon enough, … [Read more...]

Dusty Forward-Flank Tornado

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This was the first, best-organized and perhaps longest-lived, of several tornadoes that developed along the forward-flank/inflow interface of a weird, midday, occluded-front-riding supercell, nearly collocated with a synoptic low, in northwestern Kansas.  It raised a tremendous amount of field dust for at least 10 minutes before being hidden behind that oncoming wall of rain to the left.  The rain … [Read more...]

Crawler beyond the Farmhouse

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Taking this shot from a public right-of-way, I still couldn't help but notice the lit, occupied mobile home serving as a farmhouse, and wondering what the occupant was thinking about all the flickering and noise outside.  Valuable and welcomed west Texas rain?  Static-causing, loud nuisance to TV watching?  Danger to electronics within and livestock without?  All of the above?  The storm formed … [Read more...]

Prairie Storm Looming

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Looming darkly over a couple abandoned South Dakota schoolhouses, a big supercell base casts an ominous pall over the landscape, while a wall cloud gathers (behind the gap between the buildings).  Despite the size and obvious great depth of this growing storm, it would fail to produce a tornado before being overtaken by a raging complex.   That trailing activity evolved from an earlier supercell … [Read more...]