For anyone wondering whether intense dust storms, like 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 over-use, wildfire, 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 mile per hour 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 sai

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