Our group has been monitoring the dust west of Lordsburg on interstate 10 near the playa. Our remote cameras have been showing a few dust events that reminds me to be cautious when driving over that kind of landcover. I posted a clip from June 9 of this year on YouTube to show much of a problem that area is to motorists. What is troubling is the length of time that the dust obscured the road. In this case it lasted about 7 minutes. The view looks east along the highway and is approximately the same area as the May 2014 accident that took lives.

July 7, 2015

So far the monsoon precipitation has been above average for most of the state of New Mexico but below average in a few places in southern part of the state. The monsoon "season" officially started in June 15 and at Las Cruces station at NMSU recorded 0.33 inches of precipitation. This is in comparison to the long term average of 0.74 inches.

With this precipitation deficit, we are bound to see dry soils and dust when thunderstorms blow through the area. Today was one of those cases and we saw brief but high winds during thunderstorms in the afternoon. I took the photo below at 3:51 pm standing on the Las Cruces dam vista.

This was caused by a thunderstorm outflow and can easily be seen in the weather radar. I highlighted the outflow boundary in yellow and the arrow shows the direction of movement.