- What would you do if you saw this coming?

(wind roaring) It's not just any dust storm.

That's a haboob.

It's an Arabic word that means gale or strong wind, but now it refers to a particular type of dust storm that includes a menacing wall of dense dust that can tower thousands of feet into the air, span 100 miles across, and even black out the sun.

They're common in arid parts of the world, like the Middle-East Africa, Australia, and here in the U.S. they're becoming more common as drought exposes more and more soil in places like Arizona and Texas.

Are we witnessing the beginning of a new American dust bowl?

Keep watching to find out.

(plaintive music) - [Narrator] The earth is not the good earth to man without rain.

Rain for the earth, rain to bring up the falling water table, rain to make crops grow, rain for the grass that ties the earth and place.

- [Maiya] The Dust Bowl of the 1930s has been called the greatest ecological disaster in U.S. history.

It was caused by a particularly hot dry air that coincided with failed farming practices that exposed the top soil to the sun and wind, and created lots of dust storms.

It's hard to imagine what it was like to have such frequent dust storms, but we're experiencing what scientists called a hot drought.

And it's the worst in 1,200 years in parts of the West, which means more bare soil is exposed as vegetation dries out.

Kim Wade lives in Lamesa, Texas, where they get enough storms each year that there's actually an alarm that sounds when one's coming, but you can't always get home in time.

Can you just tell me from start to finish what happened?

- So that day we were predicted to have pretty decent wind, wind gusts in the 50 to 60, sustained up to 40.

So we knew a day or two ahead of time it was going to be windy.

One of us had to go get the kids.

I guess I drew the short straw on that one.

And so I got in the car and started to make my way home.

About 10 miles outside of town the visibility was just very, very poor.

There were times when I thought I'm not going to make it.

Just absolutely insane.

(wind roaring) I had to pull over because I couldn't even see the lines on the road.

It is so bad.

- And pulling over was definitely the right call.

In July of 2021, eight people died in a 22 car pile up during a dust storm in Utah.

That sounds absolutely terrifying.

How concerned were you for your safety in that moment?

- I ended up deciding that it was better to arrive late to pick up my kids than to not arrive at all.

And I waited about 15 minutes until it finally let up enough where I could see the road again to start trying to go home.

- To understand more about haboobs and dust storms, we talked to Karin Ardon-Dryer, Professor of Atmospheric Studies at Texas Tech, who's made a career out of studying these events.

- So I work on dust storms.

I try to understand how they form, when do they form, and what are their impact on climate and also on our health.

- Can you give me a basic explanation of the mechanics of a dust storm?

- Sure, so there's several things you need to have a dust storm.

One is bare soil, and ideally if it will be dry, because then it's easier for the particle to move, and you need wind, strong winds able to blow these sand particles and dust particles into the air.

But there's actually different types of dust storms.

There's the more synoptic dust storms.

And these are larger dust storms caused by different meteorological causes like a cold front and low pressure system.

These would be longer duration of dust storm that the wind will just continue to blow.

On the other hand, there's also convective dust storms.

These are short duration.

Normally they would form this wall of dust that we call haboob.

And these would cause from the fact that there is a storm somewhere, a convective system, and as the rain falls from the system and evaporate it cools the air.

And as the air comes down, it hits the ground, and as it hits the ground, it needs to go somewhere.

So it's moving to the sides, and that basically allows for these particles to uplift into the air, and in some cases form this wall of dust that we're so familiar here in West Texas.

- And what should people do if they find themselves caught in a dust storm?

- Stay home.

And if you're driving, the best thing is to move down from the road where it's safe, turn off the light until visibility will get back to something you could see and then drive.

People lose their life every year because of car accidents during dust storms.

There's a lot of health complication with dust particles.

And that's another thing that I'm working on, trying to understand what happens when we breathe these particles.

We expose human lung cells to these particles to see what would be the interaction and when asthma attack could happen.

- [Maiya] This is important work because dust storms cause severe damage to lung tissue leading to increased asthma attacks and lung disease, but not everything about dust storms is bad.

Those dust particles are critically important to ecosystems around the world.

Every year dust from the Sahara desert in Africa gets blown across the Atlantic Ocean to land in the Amazon rainforests of South America, providing critical nutrients, including phosphorus that fertilized soil.

- These particles can cross across the world.

Move, as you mentioned earlier, from Sahara all the way to Atlanta.

It also last year made it all the way to West Texas, where I live.

- In the bigger picture, dust storms are yet another reason for us to come together to fight climate change.

Scientists are warning with increasing urgency that as temperatures continue to rise, so does our chances of seeing a resurgence of catastrophic drought and dust storms similar to the 1930s.

If and when that happens, we'll have no choice but to deal with the disastrous consequences to our environment, agriculture and human health.

- [Karin] Model predicting that as climate change progresses, it's getting hotter.

We're going to see more and more of these dust storms.

Whether they're going to be more severe or more frequent, we don't know yet, but we are aware to the fact that we're going to have more and more of these.

- In case it's not clear by now, we need to take dust storms seriously.

If alerts are issued for your area, make sure to listen and get off the road and indoors.

(tranquil music)