 |
| Image of yesterday's massive haboob taking over the Phoenix metro area. |
I went on and on about the extreme summer heat there the other day, but yesterday, things got really wild out there in Arizona.
A haboob, or giant dust storm hit the area as monsoon thunderstorms raged over large parts of Arizona and adjacent southeast California.
Outflow from the storms stirred up the massive, apocalyptic looking wall of dust that dropped visibility to zero when it hit.
The haboob hit during the evening commute and some motorists said they couldn't see past their car hoods. The National Weather Service warned everyone to "pull aside to stay alive."
Apparently, everyone did. So far, I haven't seen any reports of deaths or serious injuries.
Winds were intense in this swirling dust storm. A gust to 94 mph was reported at Sun Tan Valley, in the southeastern outskirts of the Phoenix metro area. The wind at Sky Harbor International Airport gusted to 70 mph amid the clouds of dust. Visibility there was at zero from 5:35 to 5:51 p.m.
The temperature at the airport fell from 100 to 79 degrees in just 17 minutes.
To the shock of nobody, the haboob delayed plenty of flights at the airport. A ground stop there lasted a good hour. A connector bridge at the airport was shredded by the storm, and part of a roof at a terminal was damaged.
Power lines and even utility poles snapped. Trees fell on houses, cars and carports. Photos and video from the Phoenix showed fallen trees, traffic signals and wires. The bottoms of countless swimming pools were covered in dirt.
 |
| The haboob yesterday about to swallow the Phoeni Sky Harbor airport. |
In Arizona Monday, the haboob was followed in many areas by torrential rains from the parent thunderstorm.
As the rain turned the dust to mud then washed it away, flash flood alerts blared in the Phoenix area, along with many other areas in southern Arizona and far southern California away from the coast.
The haboob traveled quite a distance, too. It developed a little north to Tucson, then slammed through Casa Grande around 4:25 p.m. local time before slamming into Phoenix an hour later. Which means it traveled a good 60 miles at least.
Haboobs are pretty common in arid areas, including in the U.S. Desert Southwest. A similar serious haboob swept through the Burning Man festival in northwest Nevada last weekend, ripping up encampments and other temporary structures.
Some observers say the Phoenix haboob on Monday was the most intense since July, 2011.
Every weather emergency has its precautions, and haboobs have theirs. Motorists who see a wall of dust coming should pull into a parking lot. Or, if none is available, pull as far off the side of the road as possible.
People are told to shut off their car lights. The visibility in haboobs is so bad that people have been known to smash into parked cars with lights on, thinking they were on the highway. Kind of like a blizzard here in Vermont. Except obviously with sand, not snow.
More haboobs, big thunderstorms and flash floods are possible in the Desert Southwest for the rest of today and likely tomorrow.
On a vaguely humorous note, spell check kept trying to make me say Phoenix was hit with either a "kabob" or a "baboon" either of which would have been more fun and probably less dangerous.
Videos:
Storm chaser Aaron Rigsby got some amazing shots of the Arizona haboob. Click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that:
Another video from the Associated Press, shows what it was like to be in a car during the haboob, then a timelapse of the haboob, followed by torrential rain, sweeping into downtown Phoenix. Again, click on this link to view, or if you see the image below, click on that:
No comments:
Post a Comment