Inside the 2025 Weather Photographer of the Year Awards

There are moments when the sky transcends its role as mere atmosphere and becomes a living canvas — fragile, furious, and profoundly beautiful. The 2025 Standard Chartered Weather Photographer of the Year Awards, hosted by the Royal Meteorological Society, have once again revealed how photographers around the world translate meteorology into visual poetry. From tornadoes twisting over Texan plains to moon halos glimmering in icy Czech skies, this year’s winning images remind us that weather is not background — it is the stage itself.

But the showstopper came from above: a perfectly circular rainbow, a sight so rare it borders on the miraculous. Captured by Geshuang Chen and Shuchang Dong, this full-circle bow of refracted light crowned the competition’s 10th anniversary edition with a vision of sublime precision.

The Spectacle Above: A Circle of Light and Chance

Rainbows, by nature, are partial illusions — their arcs limited by the horizon. Yet from the lens of a drone hovering above a still lake, Chen’s photograph reveals the rainbow in its entirety, a flawless halo of light suspended between water and air.

This perspective — literally beyond human reach — transforms the familiar into the celestial. The result is both a technical triumph and an existential one: a reminder of how human ingenuity can extend our perception of nature without diminishing its mystery.

The judges praised not only the image’s otherworldly beauty but also its metaphorical resonance.

Everything is becoming more extreme, It highlights the vastness of weather. We don’t stand much of a chance against that.

– Noted meteorologist Phillipa Drew, reflecting on how this circle of serenity contrasts sharply with the storms and droughts defining our climate era.

Out of more than 4,000 entries submitted by photographers across the globe, the circular rainbow stood as a symbol of completeness — nature’s infinite loop, glimpsed just once in perfect alignment of sun, mist, and machine.

Tempests and Transience: The Power of the Elements

Tornadoes and Tempests — Jonah Lange’s “Dust and Fury”

The Climate Award went to Jonah Lange, whose tornado spiraling across the Texas plains captured the raw ferocity of Earth’s shifting atmosphere. His photograph is not simply meteorological documentation — it’s a confrontation with the sublime. The tornado’s red dust whirls into the sky, a living sculpture of power and fragility.

This tornado picked up tons of dust as it landed.

– Lange recalls.

His shot embodies that tension between awe and alarm — a portrait of a planet increasingly charged by its own imbalance.

Sky Waves — Lukáš Gallo’s Dream of Motion

Public favorite Lukáš Gallo caught the sky in the act of imitating the sea. His photograph of Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds — rolling, wave-like forms that appear when wind shear sculpts the air into curls — reveals how the atmosphere mirrors the motion of oceans.

I didn’t plan this, but I think that’s the best kind of photograph.

– Gallo admits.

His instinctive capture of this fleeting phenomenon is an ode to the quickness of observation, the artist’s eternal readiness before the ephemeral.

Light, Ice, and Infinity: The Poetics of the Atmosphere

Jaroslav Fous and the Night Halo

In the snowy Ore Mountains, Jaroslav Fous waited hours for the moon to rise. When it did, the heavens answered with an otherworldly halo: concentric rings, arcs, and light pillars formed by ice crystals dancing in the air.

The resulting image combines scientific precision with mystical beauty. Each optical effect — from the 22° and 46° halos to the faint Parry arc — depends on the micro-architecture of ice crystals. Fous’s photograph becomes an atmospheric anatomy lesson, where physics and wonder coexist seamlessly.

Ellen Ross and the Promise of Blue

In contrast, Ellen Ross, runner-up in the Young Photographer category, found hope within the storm. Paddling across Lake Michigan with her father, she caught a menacing storm cloud pierced by a sliver of blue.

I think it shows good days to come.

– She says.

Her simple intuition carries a profound truth — even within turbulence, light insists on return.

Toward the Storm: Photography as Witness

Tamás Kusza and the Courage to Stay

For Tamás Kusza, runner-up in the Mobile Category, the act of photographing storms is an act of devotion. His image, taken on a dirt road in Slovakia, shows a lone bicycle and a darkening sky — the stillness before surrender.

Would I stay and capture the storm, or turn back?

– He writes.

His choice, like the photograph itself, reveals a deeper human impulse: to face what we fear, to find beauty in the threshold of destruction.

Waves of Fury — Jadwiga Piasecka and Shaun Mills

From the coasts of Newhaven and Norfolk, photographers Jadwiga Piasecka and Shaun Mills documented the sea’s unbridled strength during England’s violent Storm Eunice. Their images — crashing waves, walls of spray — are both elegy and warning. The ocean, long romanticized, now roars as a voice of protest against the warming world.

The Art of Weather: Beauty, Fragility, and Change

Photography of the weather has always been about transience — the split second between stillness and upheaval. Yet this year’s winners also speak to the ethics of observation in an age of environmental reckoning.

From a drone’s divine vantage to a child’s quick capture on a paddleboard, these photographs merge technology, intuition, and reverence. They remind us that the atmosphere is both muse and mirror — reflecting our awe, our anxiety, and our belonging to something immeasurably larger.

As storms intensify and rainbows become rarer, the artists behind these images perform an act of preservation: to see is to remember, and to remember is to care.