Early morning dust storm strikes Coachella Valley, haze remains
The Coachella Valley woke up to a gloomy-looking, hazy-like day today.
Following a weekend of sunny skies and excessive heat with temperatures in the one-teens, Monday’s weather was quite different.
Late last night, a line of intense thunderstorms over southwestern Arizona rumbled their way to the west-northwest into Southern California. By 2 AM, they began to collapse. The outflow from these dying storms produced brief but gusty winds which kicked up quite a bit of dust and dirt, pushing it into the Southeast end of the Coachella Valley.
The dirt that these storms kicked up into the air will take several hours to settle back to the ground. Until then, the First Alert weather team says you can expect hazy conditions and dust all around our local area. That same southeast surface flow also ushered-in that sulfur-like smell from the Salton Sea caused by hydrogen sulfide.
Air quality remains diminished during this time. The South Coast Air Quality Management District has listed our local area as “very unhealthy.” Those who have a sensitivity to low air quality will want to take extra precautions and avoid too much time outside today.
News Channel 3 Chief Meteorologist Haley Clawson warned late Sunday that there was a Blowing Dust Advisory.
{“url”:”https://twitter.com/KESQHaley/status/1016266066408943616″,”author_name”:”Haley Clawson KESQ”,”author_url”:”https://twitter.com/KESQHaley”,”html”:”&#lt;blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”&#gt;&#lt;p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”&#gt;Why the wind? &#lt;br&#gt;It’s due to this mess arriving from the east. A Blowing Dust Advisory has been issued through 5AM with 20-30MPH winds. Exercise extreme caution if you find yourself out on the roads this early. &#lt;a href=”https://t.co/VHwgs6vg6P”&#gt;pic.twitter.com/VHwgs6vg6P&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/p&#gt;– Haley Clawson KESQ (@KESQHaley) &#lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/KESQHaley/status/1016266066408943616?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”&#gt;July 9, 2018&#lt;/a&#gt;&#lt;/blockquote&#gt;n&#lt;script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″&#gt;&#lt;/script&#gt;n”,”width”:550,”height”:null,”type”:”rich”,”cache_age”:”3153600000″,”provider_name”:”Twitter”,”provider_url”:”https://twitter.com”,”version”:”1.0″}
Incidentally, the dust storm was intense enough that the arc of dirt produced by this thunderstorm outflow was picked-up by radar at around 2:30/3 AM.
The chance of thunderstorms over Southern California will be on the increase this week, especially Tuesday and Wednesday as additional monsoonal moisture is pulled up over the southland.
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