SkyPix

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

Rollin’ Skyward

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Even it weakening states, supercells still can be beautiful, as this one was after its peak organization, while entering a more-stable air mass and shrinking.  Still, supercells often linger longer than what the surrounding environment alone would indicate, thanks to the vertical pressure-gradient forces (VPGFs) generated by their low-pressure cores developed in higher-buoyancy conditions.  That … [Read more...]

Lightning Highway

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Four of nearly 80 cloud-to-ground flashes I shot that night split the rainy, dusty monsoonal skies between Tucson and Phoenix.   The second from left did contact ground inside the rain core, and the rightmost was a split single discharge with two ground contacts performed at once.  Through several cores that crossed the same area, the strikes mostly happened in bursts of 2-5 at a time, where "a … [Read more...]

High Plains Rotation

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Here is one of those great parts of the Great Plains: wide-open views, very nearly flat, and devoid of trees.  Many folks see this as boring, or flyover country.   Spread a supercell across its sky, however, and no grander place exists on God's green Earth than assorted patches of high plateau from west Texas to northern Montana.  Each spring, yearning renews as strong as ever for the beauty and … [Read more...]

Benson Blast

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Only sporadic, mostly crawler lightning flashed from the trailing part of a thunderstorm cluster, but with only a few very sparse cloud-to-ground strokes.  Holding out hopes for one more CG over northern Benson, after missing the others from this convection, the best of them all blasted forth diagonally across the field of view.  A crisply undulating, lengthy report of thunder soon followed, then … [Read more...]

Sulphur Shelf

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After enjoying a sunset under the trailing, higher-based flanking clouds, the tail end of a backbuilding squall line rushed out of the golden northwestern skies with a wet fury.  This shelf cloud firmed up its structure while approaching hastily, sending one solitary storm observer scurrying back into the vehicle upon the onset of the cold, rainy rush of outflow. 3 E Sulphur, OK (9 Apr 21) … [Read more...]

Flash Flood and the Storm that Caused It

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Water flows through typically dry desert rivers by just one method most of the time: flash flooding.  So it was here, as storms rolled westward off the Sacramento Mountains and onto the desert floor of the Tularosa Valley, ultimately to wetten the northern parts of the famous White Sands dune field.  In the distance at right was the core of the multicell thunderstorm that caused this flooding, as … [Read more...]