Thursday, November 18, 2010

Nov. 18 - Continued to be a nice sunny day with some modest warming from yesterday. High at LC airport was 64 and low 27. Today's Aqua image showed very little cloud cover but missing western part of state.

I spent the whole day driving to and from Tucumcari so what I know is from data. While driving to Tucumcari I saw whisps of an elevated smoke plume that I thought looked like it was from the Gila prescribed fire. At around 10am I was at Carrizozo and noticed that the visibility decreased just below the height of the nearby mountain to the east, making the mixing height around 2900
feet AGL. However today's HMS smoke plume product does not show any plume over this area.

Below are the spot weather forecasts for the Albuquerque Weather Forecast Office (WFO). There was a request today for a 40 acre fire 8 miles south of San Antonio along the bosque. Also a 500 acre burn southeast of Datil.

Even at Tucumcari there was a hint of an aerosol layer looking toward the west. MODIS aerosol optical depth was again very low. The AOD from Aqua is shown below.

This evening's PM2.5 is looking high based on a graph from NMED's website. Peak PM2.5 was around 50 µg/m3 at 9 pm. Probably a low wind, high PM event.

and similar for Sunland Park at the City Yard site except a little earlier in the evening. Peak PM2.5 was around 45 µg/m3 at 6pm.

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