Yesterday's (Sunday) haboob that blew through Las Cruces was spectacular in that I didn't really expect a distinct wall of dust. I was watching the radar echoes of the outflow boundary around 6:30 pm and noticing it move northward. The photo below was snapped at 6:57 pm as it crossed over A-Mountain and the southern part of Las Cruces.
We've uploaded to YouTube a time lapse of the haboob from the same location but looking directly south. YouTube timelapse. This haboob is not a spectacular as the ones in Phoenix but it's the most dramatic I've seen in Las Cruces. The video is a little shaky since I had to hold down the tripod during the high winds to keep it from blowing away. The surface weather map at 00 UTC (6 pm) showed winds from the south and high dewpoints to our east.
The haboob showed up very clear on the weather radar and you can watch for yourself the progress of it by clicking on the animation below. The haboob boundary shows up as the string-like line moving from the south toward the north through the animation.
As a bonus, I show a plot of lidar backscatter from our ceilometer located just west of the NMSU campus. The plot shows that the leading edge of the haboob extends to about 700 meters above the ground. As expected the highest backscatter levels and likely highest particle concentrations are near to the ground. Impacts of the haboob also continued for more than 3 hours but the most dense part lasted about an hour.
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