A low-pressure system (click here) brought strong winds—gusting to 55 miles (85 kilometers) per hour—to the Southern Plains on March 18, 2014. The winds picked up exposed soil from the parched landscape, resulting in a large dust storm that covered parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. The storm was the second in the past week to sweep across the region with similar wind patterns.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) acquired these images of the storm on March 18. The top image shows the dust over the Texas Panhandle at 1:15 p.m. Central Daylight Time from the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. The second image, from the Aqua satellite, was acquired at 2:50 p.m. Comparing the two images shows the development of the storm through the day. The differences in color are due to changes in lighting.
The dust in this image originated in New Mexico. The plume stretched across about 175 kilometers (110 miles) in the top image, but was somewhat dissipated a couple of hours later. The large images show dust across a wider area, including a second large dust plume in southern Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma....

First published March 19th 2014, 5:32 am

By Henry Austin

 

A massive wall of dust (click here)  known as a haboob rose up to 1,000 feet high and 200 miles wide as it roared across West Texas and New Mexico Tuesday.

The dust was lifted into the air ahead of a fast-moving cold front that reached Lubbock, already suffering from a lingering drought, National Weather Service meteorologist Charles Aldrich told NBC Dallas-Forth Worth. Wind gusts reached 50 mph, he added....