Winning weather photography announced

Photos came in from around the country, but in the end, there was only one Grand Prize winner in Weatherwise Magazine’s 2016 Photo Contest: Fred Wasmer of Gainesville, Florida, won for his picture of a jet aircraft flying underneath a bank of mammatus clouds.

According to Margaret Benner Smidt, editor of Weatherwise, “The judges were impressed by this year's particularly robust selection of photos – there were many that could have made the grade as winners.” The panel of judges, which consists of Bob Ryan, former president of the American Meteorological Society; Stanley David Gedzelman, a retired professor of meteorology at the City College of New York; and Doyle Rice, Weather Editor at USA Today, had a tough time selecting the winners. In the end, Benner Smidt says, they chose the fourteen photos that “best exemplify the power, beauty, and excitement of weather. The photos selected balance quality of image with rarity of the phenomenon photographed”.

Some of the best photos this year were of crepuscular and anti-crepuscular rays, auroras, funnel clouds, dust devils, banner clouds, lenticular clouds, arc clouds, mammatus, coronas, and halos.