NM Border Air Quality Blog

Feb. 27 and 28 - dust event days

Both February 27th and 28th were dusty days with active weather patterns bringing dust to the border lands.
The upper level pattern for February 27 shows a trough approaching from the west and centered off-shore of California.

February 27 started off with road closures in southeast Arizona along interstate 10. Below are snapshots of tweets from AZ DOT and the NWS office in Tucson.

EPA's AQI forecast for today and tomorrow reflect the high winds

The forecast for tomorrow (Feb. 28) is showing blowing dust over a third of the state.

Our team is off to the Arizona dust workshop in the afternoon so we will find out what roads are closed first hand.

By the time we arrived in Lordsburg, the road through I-10 in Arizona was open to traffic. That gave us an opportunity to stop by the Lordsburg playa to download a few camera memory cards before the Arizona dust meeting.

February 28, 2017

We overnighted in Casa Grande, Arizona and attended the AZ dust workshop from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm on the campus of Central Arizona College, Coolidge, AZ.

The upper level trough moved eastward and in a position that nornmally see dust storms in the Chihuahuan Desert.

At the surface a cold front moves through the region.

By the afternoon, our satellite products started to pick up dust plumes in Mexico. The animation below is from GOES sounder in the longwave spectral region

and a view from GOES in the visible spectrum.

By noon the dust plumes were clearly visible on the VIIRS dust product from NASA SPoRT. The dust plumes show up as the pink shades.