SkyPix

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

Dusty High Plains Tornado

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Rather like a puffer fish, this tall High Plains tornado (best manifest by the darkest, somewhat tilted column within the dust mass) made itself look much bigger than it was. It lofted enormous volumes of dirt from a plowed field, centrifuging much of the soil outside the radius of maximum winds, then into the surrounding, subcloud mesocyclone and rear-flank downdraft. Such behavior gave it an … [Read more...]

Happy Sky

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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...]