SkyPix

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

Rush Sparks and Flash Flood 2

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Elevated thunderstorms, built upon one outflow surge after another, continued to light up the sky across west-central Kansas.  The storms fired spidery crawler lightning this way and that, to the delight of a shivering but satisfied storm photographer and meteorologist.  Sometimes it's hard to imagine how an elevated updraft as small as the one at right could produce so much electricity, but the … [Read more...]

Stafford Blow: South

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[Part 3 of 3]  Being fresher development, this bowing storm complex had not yet built up enough of a cold pool to trail along outflow boundary of its own, well to the southwest.  Instead its beautiful shelving was more symmetric from north to south.  Compare this to the south view of a larger, severe bow echo from 12 years before.  Somewhere slightly farther south of here lay the outflow boundary … [Read more...]

Stafford Blow: Middle

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[Part 2 of 3]  But for the stubbly tan soil, tree rows and grid-straight highway of west-central Kansas as a foreground, the central part of the onrushing St. John/Stafford bow could be confused for a scene from someone's overly active imagination of the atmosphere on a science-fiction world many light-years away.   This storm layered outflow upon outflow, as it impinged on a slightly heated and … [Read more...]

Stafford Blow: North

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[Part 1 of 3]  Irrigating the storm apparently worked, because a former supercell by now had turned into a small but severe bow echo, still with an embedded mesocyclone and large hail.   As such evolutions are wont to do, especially when forcing somewhat stabilized air from earlier outflow, this storm stacked layer upon layer pf parallel, photogenic cloud material, the bottom of course being the … [Read more...]

Electrical Ray near Sunray

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One of the meanings of "rayo" in Spanish is "lightning flash", which makes sense given that they are natural electricity rays.  [Not to be confused with "electric rays", the jolting fish...] This "ray" cooked a bit of ground in the north-central Texas Panhandle, and formed a starkly beautiful High Plains scene in combination with the textured underside of a shelf cloud in the high foreground.  … [Read more...]

Amarillo by Mesocyclone

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A menacingly low wall cloud, especially for the High Plains, rotated moderately, compelling close watch for anything tighter.  We did so, but it didn't produce a tornado.  Fortunately this was also close enough to the Amarillo forecast office that they could see it from the back door, from this stage on through the next 20 minutes or so.   A lot of precip already was falling behind the … [Read more...]