This photo taken in the Salton Sea area by NWS #Skywarn Spotter Steve.For those who occasionally hike or camp in deserts, I’d like to share a recent weather event we had in our lovely desert on Oct 6, 2022. Should you happen to experience one of these this post will explain what happened.
It is called a Haboob, which is an Arabic name. This is what it looked like down by the Salton Sea, which is about 60 miles from our house.
What is a Haboob
This article at Wikipedia explains what a Haboob is much better than I can.
How did it Happen?
What happened was a thunderstorm was forming in the Northern Mexico/Yuma, Arizona area and the thunderstorm collapsed creating the Haboob dust storm event.
On the news it was reported that a Haboob, originating in the Imperial Valley (south of the Salton Sea) was approaching Palm Springs from the South bringing strong winds and dust that was reducing visibility down to about 1/4 mile.
Holy Cow! Haboobs are very rare here, as a winds from the South. I think the last Haboob was in 2014, eight years ago. Southerly winds almost always mean bad weather here.
The “Aftermath”
I was planning to do some astrophotography that night. Weather and sky quality predictions were pretty good here in Palm Springs by both Astrospheric and Clear Dark Sky websites, both of which are usually fairly accurate. As I usually do, I sat down to watch the local news weather report on TV while Joyce was preparing dinner. At the time there was no wind and the forecast was for the same.
The Haboob affected the air quality in Imperial, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. If you are familiar with these areas, it is larger than many states.
These 3 images are from The Desert Sun Newspaper Online, taken just north of Palm Springs looking south.
The news said the storm would be over by around 8PM. We got some strong winds just after 7PM. By 8:30 is was calm again, but the sky was poor.
I had set up both of my telescopes and mounts to capture some new targets. So my main goal was framing and rotation, then begin to capture images. I couldn’t locate my targets or track the objects until around 10PM. But the images were so poor I couldn’t actually make out the targets in the pictures. I decided to let the equipment run and went to bed. Around 3AM the images were fairly clear to confirm my settings. Air quality here was pretty poor here until around 2PM today. Looks like imaging will be back to normal tonight!
If you are ever in a desert backpacking and see a Haboob coming your way, it probably will be windy for a short time, but not as windy as some of the storms we get here every year. Afterwards everything will be covered with dust and sand, plus the air quality will be poor.