More dust storms called haboobs are coming to California, thanks to climate change

tomwt — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:20:47 +0000

More dust storms called haboobs are coming to California, thanks to climate change tomwt Thu, 09/04/2025 - 08:20 More CNAS in the Media Susanne Rust | LA Times August 27, 2025

LOS ANGELES TIMES - For anyone wondering whether intense dust storms, such as the haboob that enveloped Phoenix this week, are possible in Southern California, the answer is yes.

They’ve hit in the recent past and are a growing issue over much of Southern California and the Central Valley, thanks to the drying associated with climate change, water overuse, wildfires, off-roading, tractors on dry soil, and construction, experts say.

In 2022, for instance, there was a massive haboob in the Salton Sea area. The dust from that nighttime storm — with a 3,000-foot-high wall of dust and 60-mph winds — went all the way to Los Angeles.

“It was insane,” said Amato Evan, a climate researcher at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was so thick that cameras picked it up in Riverside, he said. More sensitive instruments measured the particles all the way from Lake Elsinore to Pasadena and downtown Los Angeles. He said a similar storm occurred in 2023.

Both of those storms were on the same scale as the one in Arizona this week, but they happened at night and in far less populated areas.

“Dust storms are a widespread air quality problem across California, especially in those areas that are dry and getting drier,” William Porter, a professor of atmospheric dynamics and modeling at UC Riverside, said in an email.

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