NM Border Air Quality Blog

Jan. 19 - Winds was the major story today. Low was 33F and high temperature at NMSU was 71F. Below is the RUC surface wind forecast for 20 UTC (1 pm MST) today. Based on this we would likely see some blowing dust today in our region.

 

The NWS forecast for Las Cruces is for a "west wind 14 to 17 mph increasing to between 23 and 26 mph. Winds could gust as high as 36 mph." In the morning we saw some high clouds over northern Chihuahua but sunny over the rest of the region. We saw another strong inversion taken at the Santa Teresa NWS office. this morning.

 

The morning winds were low so we saw some low wind stagnation at Anthony. There hourly PM10 was 128 µg/m3 and PM2.5 is 18 µg/m3 during the 8 am measurement hour.

At the NMSU core site we saw the highest PM10 at 2 pm with a peak hourly concentration of 216 µg/m3. Maximum winds during the event were 12.5 m/s (28 mph).

 

We saw peak PM10 at the Deming Airport occur at 2 pm with an hourly concentration of 120 µg/m3.

My campus cloud cam shows the event looking west.