Dust Storm Science and Improved Road Safety in New Mexico

CLIMAS researchers, working in collaboration with the New Mexico Department of Transportation, carried out research to understand dust events in southwestern New Mexico to improve highway safety and inform the development of a dust storm early warning system that is now in use by NOAA-NWS offices in El Paso, TX and Phoenix, AZ. This work was also highlighted in the 2019 NOAA Science Report.

"Through this [interaction with CLIMAS] we were able to quickly build up a level of knowledge about dangers in the area and the frequency of dust storms."
–Trent Botkin, New Mexico Department of Transportation

CLIMAS Lead: David DuBois

Research Team: Antonio Arredondo, Jaylen Fuentes, Josue Gutierrez, Octavio Nayares, Stan Engle, Merrill Bean, Michael DeAntonio, Zahra Ghodsizadeh, Jonathan Consford, Tristan Ramirez

Publications and Reports

DuBois, D. (2022). Dust Mitigation Monitoring Project, Final Report. New Mexico State University, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences.

Gutierrez, J. (2020). Automated Detection of Dust Storms from Ground-Based Weather Station Imagery Using Neural Network Classification. New Mexico State University.

Fuentes, J. (2019). Using Time-Lapse Footage to Estimate Mineral Dust Concentrations at Heights Correlating to Passenger and Commercial Vehicles. New Mexico State University.

Etyemezian, R., Nikolich, G., DuBois, D. W., DeAntonio, M., Fuentes, J., Zadeh, Z. G., Nayares, O., & Engle, S. (2018). Early warning sensor network for brown-out conditions: Pilot implementation on I-10. SOLARIS Consortium.