NM Border Air Quality Blog

May 10 -

Yesterday brought more rain and the forecast again shows for continued rain along the border today.  Below shows this morning's multi-sensor derived precipitation across southern NM for the past 24-hours.

CoCoRaHS observers in Las Cruces measured amounts from 0.20 to 1.50 inches. The areas south of Deming also received rain.

 Below are this morning's observations at few NWS Cooperative weather stations.

                 Yesterday            Today

Station       High(F) Normal    Low(F)  Normal  Record Low Precip

Antelope Wells  69      86       48      48       38 (1995) 0.08"
NMSU campus     69      86       52      51       38 (1965) 0.19"

The rain from the past two days have helped out a lot in the precipitation deficit in southern NM. Below shows a map of percent of normal rain for the past 30 days.Anywhere you see blues to purples, that is more than 150 percent of normal.  At least for Las Cruces our 30 year average rain for May is 0.38 inches and as of today we have 0.39 at the NMSU weather station and some locations in town have close to 2 inches.This is normally our dry season so we can't complain.

 

As the storm spins away toward the east, where do we stand with precipitation today in Las Cruces?  If it doesn't rain again the whole month in Las Cruces, May 2012 will be the 25th wettest May on record. This is based on the precipitation measured at the NWS Coop station on campus.  May of 1992 was the wettest with 2.03 inches. On the other dry end of the data, 28 out of the last 121 years had no rain in May. Recall last year we had no rain in May.

Not surprising the AQI forecast is showing good air quality across the region.