Thursday, December 1, 2011

Dec. 1 - Lots of wind and dust

Most of the region was in a high wind dust event today from a strong frontal system moving over the area. This time winds were from the east. Peak hourly PM10 at the Las Cruces west mesa station was 567 ug/m3 at 8 pm. My Skeen window cam stopped this morning while I was out so my guess is either there was a brown our or my PC died. I'll find out tomorrow. With strong winds from the east, we are being impacted from a new area of dust sources compared to our usual ones to our west. This will require some work in analyzing satellite imagery.

I drove up to Albuquerque today and then up to Alcalde to fix a weather station and then back to Las Cruces. I saw a lot of winds in along I-25 especially north of TorC. The dust was thickest at Bernardo, Los Lunas, and in Albuquerque. Below is a image from MODIS (NASA Lance website) at 1 pm today showing the dust plumes in the center streaming across the bosque. The southern edge of the plume is Bernardo along highway 60.
Below is a picture taken at the Bernardo exit on I-25 at 10:33 am showing the dust plume earlier in the day.
Very nice weather in Alcalde while all the winds were occurring down south. The view below shows the SCAN weather station at the NMSU Alcalde Sustainable Agricultural Science Center and the Jemez Mountains in the background.

No comments:

Post a Comment