Tuesday, April 26, 2011

April 26 - High wind dust day

I expect to see a high wind dust event today. This morning's NWS forecasts show winds to increase to the 38 to 41 mph range in the afternoon. At 10 am it's already windy and can see a dust cloud moving in from the west with gusts in the 30 mph range in Las Cruces. The NWS expects wind gusts to be up to 55 mph later today. The RUC is predicting peak west-northwest winds around 21 UTC (3 pm MDT).
The NWS also issued a Blowing Dust Advisory at 5:14 am for our region.

The AQI forecast hasn't changed from last night and shows an area of moderate air quality in west Texas and a bulls-eye of unhealthy air quality over Albuquerque.
Here is a view out my window looking west at 2:38pm with an hourly PM2.5 concentration of 82 µg/m3.
The dust plumes covered a large area by this afternoon as seen from GOES at 23:45 UTC.

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