Phoenix Dust Storm Scale designed to measure severity of Valley haboobs

Arizona State University researchers and partners designed a new scale to measure the severity of dust storms in the Phoenix area.

The Phoenix Dust Storm Scale gauges factors such as particulate matter, wind speed, duration and geographic extent to classify events on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the most severe.

“Basically, instead of winds like the hurricane scale, we look at the amount of dust in a given volume of air. There are about 20 sensors across the Phoenix metro area that look at these dust concentrations,” Ryan Heintzman, a professor at ASU’s School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News on Wednesday.

“So, we look at the storms, and after the storms occur see what the level of concentration of dust is and classify based on that.”

Where did recent events land on Phoenix Dust Storm Scale?

A haboob — the wall of dust that can form ahead of a storm system — that reached the Valley on Sunday qualified as a Category 3 event, Heintzman said.

The monsoon dust storm on Monday evening might have seemed more intense, but it registered only as a Category 1 on the Phoenix Dust Storm Scale. Heintzman explained that the scale is tied to hourly concentration, so the category could be lower if the dust dissipates quickly.

“Monday’s storm was pretty interesting. It was a very high-end Category 1,” he said. “Some places probably saw thick dust for a short period of time, but most of the Valley received a pretty significant amount of rainfall. So, it pulled out a lot of the dust quite quickly. And so, the overall number of the peak concentration of dust was maybe lower than you might have expected simply because it was pulled out quite rapidly from the rain.”

The Phoenix Dust Storm Scale was developed for use in the Valley, although Heintzman thinks it could be implemented in other parts of the U.S. and the world.

“We have kind of designed our scale with Phoenix in mind, but with the hope that for other places that might not have these classification scales set in place yet, that it could be kind of a rubric … to use in a more localized, population-heavy area like we have here in the Valley,” he said.

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