NM Border Air Quality Blog

Dec. 16 - Storm system moving in from west that could bring in some precipitation to the study area. The Quantitative Precipitation Forecast shows the northern part of the state has the best chance of getting rain. Possibly some snow at the high elevations.

 

At 8am we have high clouds over the binational border region.This morning's radiosonde at Santa Teresa showed very shallow low level inversion and a sounding that looked a little moist compared to the last few days with clouds starting around 700 mb.

 

This morning's 500mb map shows us in the midst of zonal flow but there are areas of strong vorticity (yellow) over westcentral NM driving our storm system.

 

Looks like a mild low wind, high PM event at Sunland Park tonight. I say mild since the peak PM10 reached around 180 µg/m3 at 8 pm.

 

PM at the core site in Las Cruces showed a peak around 6 pm. Wind gusts at that thime were around 7 to 8 m/s, so I would say it's from some local wind blown dust source.