The Nuttall Encyclopædia described the simoom: The storm moves in cyclone (circular) form, carrying clouds of dust and sand, and produces on humans and animals a suffocating effect.

Local historian Walker Tompkins wrote that during the morning, the temperature hovered around the normal 24 to 27 °C (75 to 81 °F), but around 1pm, strong super hot winds filled with dust began to blow from the direction of the Santa Ynez Mountains to the north.

I don't doubt that strong hot, dry downslope winds could kick up lots of dust and produce very high temperatures – but in the 110 F – 115 F range at most.

Last Monday's weather was a very good strong example of the sort of conditions that would produce such a heat wave, and our temperatures topped out at least 20 degrees below Tompkins' figure.

This report is singular and there is physical evidence (burnt crops and dead animals) that something amazing happened here this day, but the temperature record is impossible to validate.

"[6]Edgar Allan Poe's short story "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833) features a storm off the coast of Java, wherein "every appearance warranted me [the protagonist-narrator] in apprehending a Simoom."

In the political essay "Chartism", Thomas Carlyle argues that even the poorest of men who have resigned themselves to misery and toil cannot resign themselves to injustice because they retain an innate sense that a higher (divine) justice must govern the world: "Force itself, the hopelessness of resistance, has doubtless a composing effect against inanimate Simooms, and much other infliction of the like sort, we have found it suffice to produce complete composure.

In American Notes Dickens also describes "that injurious [political] Party Spirit" as "the Simoom of America, sickening and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach.

In James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914), there is a reference to "Stephen's heart [withering] up like a flower of the desert that feels the simoom coming from afar."

In Patrick O'Brian's novel Post Captain (1972), Diana Villiers' mentally troubled cousin, Edward Lowndes, upon learning that Doctor Maturin is a naval surgeon, remarks, "Very good – you are upon the sea but not in it: you are not an advocate for cold baths.

[8] In the film The English Patient (1996) there is a scene in which Count László Almásy regales Katharine Clifton with histories of named winds, one of them being the "Simoon."

Alluding to the records of Herodotus, Almásy tells Katharine that there was once a certain Arabic people who deemed the "Simoon" so evil that they marched out to meet it ranked as an army, "their swords raised."