So one of the sequences in the short requires a dust bowl sort of sim and I've been using the dust explosion template that Niagara provides in its default state.
The dust explosion looks like this.
The problem with this is that it starts too fast. So, I dug around a bit and found some really nice tutorials by CodeLikeMe for sand storms and mist, which is a really great alternative for what we want for the shot and what I should have looked into in the first place.
Here's what I have so far.