May 26

Hazy and humid start to the day. Dewpoints were high most of the day with moist air mass boundary well into central NM. Day started off clear but convective clouds started to grow by late morning and thunderstorms in the afternoon over the mountains and to the east. I could feel the moist air mass come into Las Cruces around 10 am or so. Afternoon MODIS image below shows there spotted convective cells throughout the state.

MODIS AOD showed elevated particulates over the central part of the state and into west Texas.

By evening convective storms were producing outflow winds. These winds were high enough to blow dust around starting in the Paso del Norte region. GOES IR and mesonet maps show these outflow wind patterns nicely.

Outflow from these winds are from the east where the blue regions of storms.

The outflow winds reached the Las Cruces area between 8-10 pm but weren't that strong. By the way these convective clouds were fairly deep with cloud tops around 35,000 feet. In the evening before the sun went down I was looking at these tops and they showed the nice anvil structure fanning out after reaching the tropopause at around 10 km.

Dust was flying at all of the Paso del Norte sites with Sunland Park City Yard PM10 at 168 ug/m3 with 13 m/s maximum winds from the SE direction at 10 pm. These high PM values triggered yellow AQI (moderate level) in the AirNow maps. As of 6 pm we were right under the dryline and is still in the same place at 9 pm.

Another observation was the presence of bugs. I don't know if there was a good correlation but there seemed more bugs outside right around the time of the outflow.