SkyPix

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

Classic Supercell near Airport

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A strongly tilted, classic supercell approached Oklahoma City's airport from the southwest.  The main OKC terminal is at lower far right.  A Southwest Airlines plane barely beat the storm, taking off to the south (in the immediate inflow region) just a few minutes after this shot.  Fortunately, it was about to circumnavigate the storm easily, based on a flight-tracking app.  Fortunately, the core … [Read more...]

Battlestar Norman Supercell

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[Click Image to Enlarge] The last storm and sunset I would see from this roof as an employee turned out to be the most striking and memorable of them all.  Sweeping across the fall sunset sky from northwest to east, this astonishing supercell pulled a deep wall cloud and convection-topped rear-flank shelf through the sunset’s golden rays, presenting a scene that stunned all eyewitnesses.  From up … [Read more...]

Outflow Hits Gas Flames

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By the time this storm emerged again from the dust that cloaked it, outflow dominance had set in, and the supercell was surfing its own shelf cloud and gust front southeastward.  [I had photographed another supercell's outflow effects from near this spot 17 years earlier.]  At this moment, the associated wind shift was passing through a field of oil wells, including flaring chimneys for natural … [Read more...]

Tornadic Supercell in the Dust

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See the spectacular and majestic tornadic supercell that was right down the road and moving toward us?  No?  Good, because we couldn't either.  The only cloud we could see was the dust cloud, in roaring inflow winds lofting it from nearby dry, plowed fields, akin to a storm-scale Dust Bowl.  Based on our sequence of stops and others' observations, dust was continuous in a plume hundreds of feet … [Read more...]

Structure on the South Plains

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Normally, being east of a southeastward-moving, heavy-precipitation (HP) supercell is a lousy idea, both meteorologically and tactically.  They tend to curl the forward-flank precip region (which can contain damaging hail and flooding rains) eastward then southeastward, rendering this view of the main updraft region at this distance nearly impossible, and our storm-relative position decidedly … [Read more...]

Owachomo Natural Bridge

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Yes, here's another waterless "Water Work."  When it's not waterless, that water works well.  Spanning 180 feet, this large natural arch is composed of a tube of especially resistant Permian Cedar Mesa sandstone in Natural Bridges National Monument.  Freeze-thaw cycles happen throughout the cool season when water in wet rock freezes to crystals, which expands and pries the grains apart from their … [Read more...]