NM Border Air Quality Blog

Oct. 29 - We're back to a warming trend and we climbed back to the 70s in parts of the region. Hachita topped out with a high of 72, El Paso and Animas reached a high of 71, and Deming peaked at 69. The high at the Las Cruces airport reached 68. Our low at NMSU remained the same as yesterday at 38 degrees. The low at Antelope Wells dipped down to 35 this morning. Below are the NMSU Cooperative observations taken today.

   Yesterday           Today

High(F)  Normal     Low(F)  Normal

 66        73        38       41

It's been a busy day so I'm not getting to posting until late. Based on a look at the end of the day at Airnow the AQI in the region remained in the good (green) category all day. The Anthony NMED station saw some realtively high PM this evening along with low winds. The interesting part is that the Sunland Park stations didn't see a low wind event which they tend to be similar but less intense in Anthony.

The map below shows areas without precipitation this month through today. The darkest red regions are those below 5 percent of normal. Most of southern Dona Ana., central Catron and the southern tip of Lea county are in this category. For example our 1981-2010 normal October precipitation at NMSU is 0.94 inches. So far we have measured 0.05 inches at the station this month giving us about 5.3% of normal precipitation.