Blown Away...
Midland, Texas is generally a great place to live, but it does have it's drawbacks. Dust being chief among the negatives. The picture above is not a 1930's Dust Bowl retinted image, but a weather event that happened here this last Tuesday.

This roiling, seething mass of geologic particulate hell was caused by a micro-burst [a misnomer here..this was mega!] from a thunderstorm that was over 90 miles away to our north. For those of you who don't have massive thunderstorms coupled with flat prairieland, I'll explain the concept. As thunderstorms build with rising heat they carry massive amounts of moisture aloft to great altitudes of 40, 50, 60,000 feet or more. As the clouds encounter colder temperatures at these altitudes they lose the ability to hold this moisture, and if conditions are right, the moisture rich center of the cloud basically collapses on itself releasing the water and huge amounts of energy in the form of wind, which goes straight down. When it hits dry, dusty flatlands it spreads out and travels for long distances. Think of blowing a hard concentrated breath straight down into a pile of flour and you'll get the idea, except on a grand scale.

This one must have had the force of a small nuclear weapon; large, amazing and somewhat spooky. As I was standing in the front yard facing south and with a clear blue sky overhead, I noticed an orange glow starting to embue itself on everything. Turning around I noticed this wall cloud of dust some miles north. Before I could go inside, procure the camera and come back out, it was on us, the wind going from 0-60 mph in zero seconds. I got a rather bad image of the wall almost over me, a sheer face thousands of feet high, so I'm lucky a friend took the image above from an office building. I could barely see across the street for an hour or more and when the dust settles it covers everything with the consistency of fine talcum powder. One minute perfectly clear and calm, the next instant a maelstrom. I have some feeling of how the citizens of Pompeii must have felt as they watched the volcanic gas cloud descend upon them!

I'm still cleaning dust from the estate!