Friday, March 9, 2012

March 9 -

We've cooled down considerable after the cold front rolled through the border region. Below is this morning's observations at few NWS Cooperative weather stations.

                 Yesterday            Today
Station       High(F) Normal    Low(F)  Normal  Record Low Precip
NMSU            59      69       28      35       15 (1964) 0.00"
Jornada         55      67       19      28        6 (1964) 0.00"
Antelope Wells  54      68       30      30       20 (1996) 0.00"

Based on the AQI forecast we should be seeing good air quality along the border today.

4 comments:

  1. for the last few nights there's been a burning smell in my neighborhood, last night being the strongest and coming inside really affecting my asthma. for lack of a better descriptor it smells like a cigar burning, and only at night for hours, usually dissipating by morning. cannot find a word about this anywhere online...

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  2. Where I live in Las Cruces I frequently smell burning at night. Our's is wood smoke and only lasts an hour or two. At night winds are typically low and can concentrate smoke especially in residential areas. When I lived in Las Vegas I've observed smoke from a neighbor's fireplace come to the ground immediately after exiting the top of chimney. This usually happens when the atmosphere is "stable" and air tends to sink and not rise. In your case a cigar smell is peculiar and hard to mistake. Maybe your neighbor is stoking a few cigars? Smoke tends to get into places even when the windows are closed. Last week while waiting at a busy traffic light I've smell cigarette with my windows closed. A while ago I measured particulates in my apartment. http://web.nmsu.edu/~dwdubois/sep3-9.gif My downstairs neighbor smoked heavily and I smelled it occasionally with windows closed. The peaks in the graph were when I smelled it. Hope this helps.

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  3. i wondered if it was someone smoking a cigar but the smell permeated the area, when i got in my car this morning around 9 i could still smell it. it's 3 now and gone of course. it started when i noticed a strong smell last week also, but it smelled like trash then - and no it wasn't my own, it was outside as well. it was around 3am and i had heard a catfight so i was looking outside and noticed a black suv drive through the neighborhood with their hazards on. i was hopeful that someone had smelled it and was on the lookout for something but have yet to find any news. i wondered if it could be some of the farms cropdusting or something, or the university since it's close by. how do you measure the particulates in your apartment? thanks for the help.

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  4. I have used a TSI DustTrak nephelometer. http://www.tsi.com/dusttrak-aerosol-monitor-8520/. They are quite expensive (>$5K) and I borrowed on from my research institution in that project. Recently there are a few relatively inexpensive instruments that measure aerosol particle counts that can be used to help understand the presence of smoke and dust. One of them is from Dylos, http://www.dylosproducts.com/ and the cheapest version costs about $200. That is about the lest expensive unit out there. Alternatively you can always sift through ebay and find a used instrument for a good price but you may have to do some repairs.

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