NM Border Air Quality Blog

Dec. 7 -

Yesterday's high and today's low both set daily records at the NMSU weather station.

   Yesterday's high                     Today's low

High(F)  Normal Record Low      Low(F)  Normal  Record Low

 31        60     33 (1992)       11      29      17 (1959)

The Airnow AQI forecast for the border region includes an area of moderate air quality in the Paso del Norte and El Pso county. This is due to PM2.5.

Because of the cold air mass and snow cover, we have a substantial temperature inversion over the area based on Monday night's sounding. Sounding courtesy of NCAR RAP website.

I will be at the Border 2012 Rural Task Force meeting today in Columbus giving an update on the border health project. I will again post in the evening with a summary of the day.

Back from the meeting and four hours of driving. I was glad that the I-10 border checkpoint outbound was close and saved me a few minutes. Nice steam plume from the Luna Energy Facility as I drove by on the way near Deming. Lots of good talks and discussions about border environmental issues from air, health, water, sanitation, to ecology.

As I type this it is 24F just before midnight.  The image below shows the snow cover today from MODIS. You can see where snow is either very light or where it didn't accumulate. The green icons show locations of our new study climate stations. Click on it to show the Aqua and Terra images switch back and forth.