SkyPix

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

Happy Sky

By

Deep and crisply defined convective towers of a Texas Panhandle supercell rolled up from laminar low-level plates, pumping mass into the delicately fibrous ice-crystal anvil plume festooned with streaky mammatus.  The skeletal rear-flank downdraft's precipitation plunge (lower left) still had enough thrust to launch a rain foot, and enough outflow to kick dust (lower middle) ahead of it.  Though … [Read more...]

Blast and Swirl

By

Spectacular supercell in central Texas…in mid June?  You bet!  The weather pattern was highly unusual to place strong, supercell-favoring flow over the Hill Country at this time of year, but there we were.  This booming barber pole of swirling vapors was the second supercell in the Brady/Mason area in the span of just a couple hours, both furiously flinging electricity from their upper reaches on … [Read more...]

Panhandle Shelf, CG and Gustnado

By

The Texas Panhandle earns a well-deserved reputation for intense weather—not just from tornadoes, blizzards, heat, and hailstorms, but other severe and dangerous conditions as well.  Here, a spectacular shelf cloud formed atop a tilted slab of cold, severe thunderstorm wind.  A dagger of lightning for emphasis, and the rotating dust cloud of a gustnado as the bonus, completed the wild scene and … [Read more...]

Flanking-Line Landspout: Wide Angle

By

Here is a "nonsupercell" tornado, a.k.a. "landspout", from a supercell.  How is this possible?  The seeming self-contradiction involves a common name for a non-mesocyclonic tornado, which this was, under the flanking line of a young, intensifying supercell.  One of the flanking towers, despite being under heavy overcast from a large collective anvil shield, still was vigorous enough to stretch … [Read more...]

Tuttle Tempest

By

A few days before, I had lost a cherished storm-observing vehicle to a huge buck in eastern Colorado.  Unhurt from the wreck, but more than a little sore at having missed a couple nice Great Plains tornado days while stuck in the cold rain of Denver waiting for a rental to become available, I trudged home on this day...just in time to catch this consolation prize:   heavy-precipitation (HP) … [Read more...]

Two Windows past Grainfield

By

Near-sunset light streamed through all of many gaps in the main house of a long-abandoned northwestern Kansas homestead.  Where children sang along to the early days of radio, or their dad whistled or mom hummed a tune while doing their chores, the only music heard today is rhythmic hymns of the prairie breezes through the walls and windows, singing an epitaph for a difficult yet determined way of … [Read more...]