lcarreau wrote:Yeah, there's nothing like a HABOOB to brighten up your day! Does anybody else have previous experiences with HABOOBS
Anybody ???
Generally, haboobs don't brighten days. They darken them.
That one in July (the famous one) was the biggest I had seen in my years here. We get about 5 or 6 per summer but they usually peter out before entering the city.
In August 1997 I drove across Interstate-10 to SoCal, leaving Phoenix at 9 pm. A big thunder and dust-storm had come through and I caught up to it west of Phoenix at around MP 45 (Vicksburg Exit). It was so thick that I could not see the hood of my car, I kid you not. There truly was zero visibility for about 5 minutes. Being on an interstate in this was terrifying. I somehow got to the shoulder, turned everything off and hope I would not be slammed into. This was the same storm that flooded Antelope Canyon up on the AZ-UT line, drowning about 10 hikers who got caught in the slots and had nowhere to escape.
Another time I was at the Diamandbacks game when a big one rolled through the city. The stadium roof and openings were closed so we weren't too aware of it, but it was all over the news that night and the visiting team's announcers had obviously never seen anything like it; they were laughing on air, having more fun than kid with a stick.
The word "Haboob" is specific to a type of dust event, where a thunderstorm collapses and pushes out a huge wall of dust in a radial pattern. The dust storms that develop in the high plateau country around Winslow and Holbrook in spring are not haboobs, but "regular" dust storms brought on by straight-ahead winds.
Nevertheless, listen to Mark Grace call a Diamondbacks game; it's his favorite word.