NM Border Air Quality Blog

Feb. 15 - We had a low of 33F this morning on the campus of NMSU which is right about normal for this day. The forecasted high for today was 76F today in Las Cruces and Deming and 77F in Lordsburg. Our record for this day in 1999 was 76F. The high on the NMSU campus was 77F so we broke the record by one degree. The Las Cruces Airport reached 73F and 76F at the Deming Airport.

Looking at the map of AQI this morning we see a small area of moderate air quality in Dona Ana County. That's probably due to last night's low wind high PM event.

We saw the morning PM peak at Anthony with peak PM10 reaching 127 µg/m3 at 8 am. Peak hourly PM2.5 was 33 µg/m3 at the time.

 

This afternoon we are expecting mostly light westerly winds over the region. Below is the 21 UTC (2 pm) surface winds output from the RUC model.

 

Today I am amazed at the extremely low dewpoints that were recoreded at the Las Cruces Aiport (KLRU).  At 2:31 pm it was -36F and at 4:11 pm it dipped to -42F.  In both of those instances the relative humidity was about 1 percent.

Tomorrow is looking like we might have enough winds to pick up dust in our region. The morning forecast is showing winds in the range of 26 to 29 mph with gusts to 40 mph.