SkyPix

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

In and Out in a Flash

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Later and to the west of a profuse round of in-cloud and cloud-to-air lightning, a few cloud-to-ground flashes decorated the trailing precipitation region of the storms to my north.   This one traveled through a tilted rain core along its path of least resistance.  A short time exposure let in only a little ambient late-twilight light, yet still blurred the moving clouds, creating a rather … [Read more...]

Twin Twilight Flashes

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Twin twilight flashes dipped in and out of a rainy thunderstorm base above a large central Kansas wind farm.  I was struck, not by the lightning (fortunately), but by the two-dimensional symmetry of these discharges above the gently arching skyline of wind-energy turbines.  The surrounding countryside and sky were darker than this, but time exposure drinks in more light, making a deep twilight … [Read more...]

3 CGs and Crawlers

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This was one of several lightning episodes I shot from in, or an easy stroll of, the small motel where I was staying for the night.  Here, seen from the building's south-facing upstairs balcony, three cloud-to-ground strikes that appeared to have a common source, and a variably bright burst of crawlers, erupted in one visually perceived flash, beyond the traffic of Interstate 10.  Horizontal red … [Read more...]

Convective Arcus

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Seasoned Great Plains storm observers often find a late-day supercell absorbed into a nearby line of multicell thunderstorms that evolves into a photogenic but outflow-dominant complex of convection.  This was no exception.  Some of that convection can be seen here as deep towers directly atop the shelf cloud, where air parcels are forced by lift from the cold density current to slide up over the … [Read more...]

Northern-Sky Spectacular Gets Redder

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Just in a short few minutes, the "Northern-Sky Spectacular" changed dramatically in tone from a deep golden to this coral pink-orange, with countless mammatus pouches catching color and casting shadow.  The sky backing up a severe-storm complex was finishing a thoroughly dazzling and inspiring sunset show in multiple directions.  This made the chill of high-altitude outflow winds much easier to … [Read more...]

Contrail Flow

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The end of an all-night operational shift doesn't have to mean the end of the weather for the day.  From the parking lot of the National Weather Center, I saw an old east-to-west contrail maintaining its edges but widening while moving southward.  A plane was flying from Memphis to Las Vegas to its immediate north, creating a new, parallel contrail.  Both maintained orientation as they advected … [Read more...]