SkyPix

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

Glowing Embers

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A short exposure and long zoom captured the hot glow of wooden embers, burning onward deep into the night, long after a pile of cedar limbs and twigs had been lit aflame.  I had stood staring for several prior minutes, transfixed at the flickering convulsions of incandescence, before realizing this would make a very uncommon photograph. Norman OK (9 Feb 8) Looking down … [Read more...]

Ice Blue

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Blue in the sky, blue in the water, blue in the ice—the aura around the face of Lamplugh Glacier this day was nothing but cool hues.  The reason is simple:  Air, liquid water and ice all absorb shorter red and green wavelengths of light first.  [I would be reminded of this bluesy scene 11 years later in Iceland.]  Under differential pressure, the surface of the glacier had been crumpled into … [Read more...]

Smith Center Spinup

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An otherwise undistinguished area of an elongated supercell's cloud base, between precip areas, started to rotate quite noticeably.  A weak tornado formed–a dust whirl under the little area of pronounced cloud spin, so feeble at first that it took us a couple of minutes of staring to be sure.  Yet there it was, cloud base and dust whirl tightly rotating in sync, with thin dust rising to the base.  … [Read more...]

Sunset Cirrus

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Clean boundary-layer air behind a front in January 2000 allowed the vivid blue-red contrasts in this sunset to stand out sharply.  Contrary to popular belief, pollution yields dimmer, blurrier and less colorful sunsets because of light blockage and diffusion by particle components of haze.  So the optimal weather for good sunrise and sunset photos is when the boundary layer is at its cleanest.  In … [Read more...]

Multiple Branching Strikes

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On this night, forked CGs were flying with reckless abandon from one part of a cluster of elevated thunderstorms in southern Oklahoma.  This pair had some of the most prolific branching I had seen, with the possible exception of another wild CG tandem a few minutes earlier.  The top of the stroke at right even has some upward forks—my only film slide of a CG flash bookended by upward and … [Read more...]