I’m not so good at this Photoshop stuff:
Yesterday I took these three pictures with my phone from a point about two miles from my home, near the California Aqueduct. The wind at that location was about 25 miles an hour. Not the best pictures, but I only had my phone. Pretty crappy image meld, but hey, this sort of thing isn’t my area of expertise. But you do get an idea of what was going on. Today, by the way, is calm and beautiful.
Are these Santa Ana winds or just a freak duststorm?
Winds of this speed, and from this direction, are actually not unusual in my neck of the woods at all. A Santa Ana wind would blow in roughly the opposite direction of what’s illustrated.
But sandstorms like this one are. As zic suggests in the comment below, there must be some sort of disturbance in the usual ground cover that’s exposing more loose soil than is typical. There is a fairly clearly-identifiable point of origin, and that’s a region where agriculture has been done in the past (when there’s enough water for it). That point is also near, but it looks to me to be east of, the California State Poppy Reserve, which occupies most of the hill just behind the origin of the storm.
Looks like a soil disturbance that’s being picked up by the wind. Could be that or there’s a lot of dry, bare, loose soil without any ground cover; but 25 mph isn’t that windy for soil with roots holding it in place.
Is it possible there are large fields over there being plowed?