‘Majestic’ or just ominous? Video shows dust devil spin close to Texas neighborhood
_fitted.png "A huge dust devil came close to a neighborhood in El Paso, Texas, video shows.")
A towering dust devil came spinning toward a suburban Texas neighborhood, video captured from the driveway of an El Paso home shows.
Looming just outside the neighborhood, the swirling vortex appears almost luminous, like a spotlight moving over the sand.
The video, shared June 10 on Twitter by a local weather forecaster, is only 4 seconds long. Enough time to leave a lasting impression.
“Who knew dust could be so majestic looking?” the forecaster, Brady Brewster, said in the tweet.
Others were also impressed by the dust devil.
“That is one (huge) dust devil,” a user wrote. “The ones we see on the east coast are rarely more than leaves spinning in a circle.”
“This doesn’t look real!” another said in a retweet.
“Happy I live in Virginia where the worst thing we have is flooding. Because out west looks crazy,” a comment read.
Dust devils generally form in places where the wind is gentle and ground is hot, hot enough to warm the air above it, according to the National Weather Service. Because warm air is less dense than cool air, this creates an unstable condition in which a “localized pocket of air” rapidly rushes upward through the cooler air overhead, making a vortex that can potentially intensify into a dust devil.
They can be as small as 10 feet in diameter, according to the NWS, but the largest have diameters measuring up to 300 feet. On average, dust devils stretch 500 to 1000 feet into the sky.
A big one may look like a tornado, but they thankfully don’t have the same destructive power, the NWS says. Still, they can be dangerous.
“Even though they are generally smaller than tornadoes, dust devils can still be destructive as they lift dust and other debris into the air. Small structures can be damaged, and even destroyed, if in the path of a strong dust devil,” according to NWS.
No damage was reported in the aftermath of the El Paso dust devil.
This story was originally published June 13, 2022 at 11:34 AM with the headline "‘Majestic’ or just ominous? Video shows dust devil spin close to Texas neighborhood."