NM Border Air Quality Blog

Nov. 27 - LOW WIND EVENT - The cold remains in our area today. Low temperature at the LC airport was  a frigid 18 degrees at 7:15 am. The low at the NMSU NWS station was 19 degrees. High clouds covered the area most of the day based on both MODIS pass images. Below is the afternoon MODIS true-color image taken from the Aqua satellite.

Where I am in Green Valley Henderson it dipped to 26. Nellis AFB was a little cooler at 22. At the strip the temperature cooled to only 34 and 30 at the DRI campus. Warm temperatures probably due to some urban heat island going on. In the region, Furnace Creek Death Valley cooled to 29 degrees. That's pretty amazing given its location and elevation.

Tonight we saw another low wind, high PM10/PM2.5 event at the border. The Sunland Park City Yard site had some impressive concentrations. At 9 pm, hourly PM10 was 397 ug/m3 and PM2.5 was 108 ug/m3 with a wind speed of 1 m/s as the plot below shows.

Back in southern New Mexico high west southwest winds are forecasted for Sunday during the day in the 30 to 33 mph range with gusts up to 47 mph. That should be enough to get dust off the ground especially in the dust prone areas. I'm still out of town so this event will have to be covered with data I can get on the net. Our area is also under a red flag and wind advisory.

 

I pulled this forecast graphic from the Santa Teresa NWS website late Saturday night and it shows the extent of the high winds.Looking at Monday we see more winds but not as strong.