SkyPix

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

Cumulus Humilis, Everglades

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Benign but mildly sheared cumulus humilis clouds drift placidly over the Everglades—Florida's little estuarine version of the Great Plains.  While living in Miami, I made many short trips westward into the River of Grass, finding a large element of the same solace and immersion in the spaciousness of sky as I would during springtime sojourns to the High Plains.  It became a sort of home away from … [Read more...]

Stages of Lakeshore Ice

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Icicles of lake water, in various stages of growth, line up under a tilted shoreline log.  The lower the log, the more thoroughly the waves splashed it before the lake froze, and the thicker the icicles and columns.  The wave action also stirred up the muddy bottom as it washed against the log, coloring the water reddish from the embedded sediment, but brought up only a small amount of fine clay … [Read more...]

Wall Cloud at Sunset

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This still ranks as the most stunning, brilliantly lit sunset wall cloud I've seen.  Every bit of these colors on the Provia slide blazed into our eyeballs, and still more in the surrounding sky.  No scan, no slide, no video can do justice to the richness of the scene that the sky gave us for just a few minutes, one stormy May day outside Childress.  A mesocyclone formed along the intersection of … [Read more...]

Ice Polygons

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Polygonal ice formed on a very shallow (a few inches to a couple feet), relatively calm part of a Lake Thunderbird cove, as air temperatures slowly but relentlessly fell to below zero degrees F.  This appears to be a hybrid of processes that form round "pancake ice" on open water, and "ice-wedge polygons" atop frozen landscapes with high water content.  Clearly, chunks of ice that were not round … [Read more...]

Under Arcus

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The setting sun's warm-colored rays were filtered and softened by a thin rain core at right before being reflected, in turn, off the ragged base of the arcus cloud overhead.  The storm began as a high-based, weak supercell, then became "Tail-end Charlie" for a long squall line.  It saved its most stirring visual display for its dying, gusting-out phase, proving that outflow can be beautiful … [Read more...]

Chilling at the Lakeshore

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There's so much happening here!  For starters, the deepest arm of Lake Thunderbird, which would freeze over completely the very next day, still was warm enough to remain mostly liquid, wafting lake-effect vapors of cloud condensation into the sub-zero cold.  A mix of spray and cloud riming left ice coating these grasses and bushes, which wore skirts of ice deposited (and planed off at the bottom) … [Read more...]