Posted on 07/06/2011 4:40:51 PM PDT by originalbuckeye
Raw video of dust storm (haboob) last evening.
Oops. That would be ABC15, Phoenix.
The media haboobs have found a new arabic word to enlighten us with.
Haboob? I’ve never heard that term before, I thought you were talking about that haboob in the White House.
We used to get some pretty good dust storms up in the panhandle of Texas when I was a kid, don’t ever remember seeing a cloud like that except in photos from the Dust Bowl back in the 30s.
Good luck.
|
Really? They are saying it was 50 miles wide and 5-10,000 feet high. Hadn’t experienced one quite like this.
My thought, too. I’ve lived in AZ for most of my life and have seen a lot of dust storms. Heard that new name for them one or two years ago.
I can recall something like that catching me in Marana in the late 1970’s. Not that common for anything that large but every several years when I was working in San Manuel and growing up in Superior a big dust/sand storm would accompany the beginning of the monsoon season. Never heard them called haboobs though.
During monsoon season these come into the Phoenix area from the west in early evening. We watch from our west facing office windows and gauge whether we can beat the storm home. They are usually not this big, but it is certainly a wall of dust rolling in from the west.
I have driven in several dust storms which come from the south, like this one did. In the past there was not so much development between Phoenix and Tucson. So there wouldn’t have been as many homes involved.
I used to get a little pile of dust on my pillow every morning when I was in the barracks at McGregor Range, in the desert north of El Paso. There was no air conditioning, so it was wide open windows or roast.
|
I never heard the term monsoon applied to any place in the US until this year, either.
Does anybody have a really good weather dictionary site?
We got blasted up in the Bullhead/Havasu area as well.
Just say no to this “haboob” nonsense. It is a dust storm, so call it a dust storm. A few years back they tried calling dust storms “simoons”, which is equally stupid.
For some stupid reason, weather people are utterly enamored of non-western names for the same phenomenon.
It’s not a “tidal wave”, it is a “tsunami”. Correction. Asians get tsunamis, westerners get tidal waves. We own Hawaii, so they get tidal waves, too.
Thankfully they haven’t tried to embrace the Australian version of a tornado, which they call “willy willy or cockeyed bob”. Which would sound incredibly stupid on the evening news.
“Today, parts of Oklahoma were devastated by dozens of willy willies.”
It doesn’t help that both those expressions sound like euphemisms for male organs.
Maybe that is what Hi Jolly called them (Hi Jolly is the name given one of the camel jockeys that accompanied Lt. Beale (sp?) when camels were tried out in Arizona in the 1800’s. Last camel seen roaming the desert near Gila Bend about 1930 an monument to Hi Jolly near Florence as I recall).
I lived here 20 yrs and this is the most dust I have ever seem, however these are not that uncommon during mnsoon season
|
They called them monsoons when I was a kid in Arizona but someone would periodically write a newspaper article on how the summer rains were not really like the Asian monsoon. It seems possible that GI’s picked up the term during WWII and brought it home.
Supposedly, his name was Hadj Ali. He made the journey to Mecca, so the name.....
this dust was caused the by massive illegal alien problem we have here too
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.