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I have been known to joke that Arizona's claim to have a monsoon season is a joke. Or one of those marketing lies like when early settlers called the not-so-green Greenland, Greenland in order to attract more settlers. "You're going to call this place Barrenland, Carl? Who's going to move to Barrenland to raise a family. Call it... Greenland! No, no it's not a lie Carl, it's spinning the message. Carl, put the ax down Carl..."
( Oh look, a weather rant under the cut )
But you know what? Arizona has borrowed another foreign weather related word. Haboob. It's basically Arabic for, "It's the end of the world! Oh, wait. Never mind, it's just a miles and miles long wall of dust." We got one here in the Phoenix area the other day. Want to see it? Fortunately someone else had a camera and they posted a picture to Flickr. Haboob over Phoenix Arizona. Check that description, "A massive dust storm called a haboob hit Phoenix, AZ in the evening of July 5, 2011. It was over a mile tall and 30-50 miles wide." Forget a mile tall, check out that width. It didn't hit Phoenix. It hit Mesa, and Tempe, and Scottsdale, and Phoenix, and Guadalupe... You know, how about we just say it hit the whole thing. If a city was vaguely in the vicinity of Phoenix, it got hit.
So why write all this?
Guess who was on the road when it hit. Oh. For extra credit, guess who doesn't have functioning windshield wash sprayers. Sure, the dust alone wasn't a big problem (if you don't mind visibility dropping at times to 10-20 feet). But when it first started to rain it was a bare sprinkling that didn't do anything more than make the dust stick.
So yeah. The TL;DR version. Monsoon season in Arizona is a joke, but oh lord are the haboobs real.
( Oh look, a weather rant under the cut )
But you know what? Arizona has borrowed another foreign weather related word. Haboob. It's basically Arabic for, "It's the end of the world! Oh, wait. Never mind, it's just a miles and miles long wall of dust." We got one here in the Phoenix area the other day. Want to see it? Fortunately someone else had a camera and they posted a picture to Flickr. Haboob over Phoenix Arizona. Check that description, "A massive dust storm called a haboob hit Phoenix, AZ in the evening of July 5, 2011. It was over a mile tall and 30-50 miles wide." Forget a mile tall, check out that width. It didn't hit Phoenix. It hit Mesa, and Tempe, and Scottsdale, and Phoenix, and Guadalupe... You know, how about we just say it hit the whole thing. If a city was vaguely in the vicinity of Phoenix, it got hit.
So why write all this?
Guess who was on the road when it hit. Oh. For extra credit, guess who doesn't have functioning windshield wash sprayers. Sure, the dust alone wasn't a big problem (if you don't mind visibility dropping at times to 10-20 feet). But when it first started to rain it was a bare sprinkling that didn't do anything more than make the dust stick.
So yeah. The TL;DR version. Monsoon season in Arizona is a joke, but oh lord are the haboobs real.
