NM Border Air Quality Blog

Nov. 17 - Nice sunny day in southern NM. High at the LC airport was 64F and low was 37F. So we're on a warming trend for the next few days. A few high clouds in the area in the morning but not visible in the MODIS afternoon image.

Air quality was in the good range for aerosols and ozone. The prescribed burn in the Gila looks to be continuing but the smoke plume looks to be staying close to the fire and since the winds are not as high as yesterday, it makes sense. MODIS aerosol optical depth looks very good but lots of missing values over our area.

I decided to take a look at modeled ozone concentrations at this late hour and the EPA guidance shows around 50 ppb for 8-hour concentrations across the region. The map is for 11 pm EST so that's 9 pm MST. The model is over predicting ozone compared to NMED's measurements. The 9 pm 8-hour average ozone at La Union was 29 ppb and 18 ppb at the Deming Airport.