NM Border Air Quality Blog

March 26 - Looking at a breezy afternoon but not going to be enough for dust. Below is a look at the wind at 00 UTC (6 pm) today from the 15UTC RUC model run. Most of the highest winds will be located in NW Chihuahua this afternoon. Lowest winds are found along I-10 today.

 

This morning's MODIS/Terra AOD from the IDEA website showed some locations with elevated column aerosol. Light blue shows AOD around 0.3 and light blue colors with just a little yellow are just above 0.4. Low AOD are shown as the area with the dark blues.

 

I did not locate any fires in the area looking at my usual sources of information. Hysplit backtrajectories using 40kmEDAS from the area west of Hatch show airmasses coming from the west through southern Arizona and San Diego. The backtrajectories in the map below were generated stating from 18 through 06 UTC and going back 48 hours. Hard to tell what sources contributed since trajectories passes through urban areas and a few small wildfires.

Today's AQI forecast shows good air quality throughout the state.

 

I again tried to access the NMED air monitoring webpage but it appears to be down.

The next chance for a significant wind event could be the middle of next week. On Wednesday an upper low is forecasted over our area. The map below shows winds from the 12Z GFS for Wednesday afternoon. It is still far out there so I'm keeping an eye out on this one.