New Mexico Department of Health

The Southwest Climate Gap seeks to understand the relationship between climate and poverty in New Mexico and Arizona, a field that is known as climate justice research. How does the southwestern climate—especially heat/cold extremes and precipitation associated with El Niño—affect low-income populations and communities of color in the southwest? Phase I results on southern Arizona were published in Local Environments, 2016.

Phase II examines acute and chronic climate vulnerability to extreme climate events in southern New Mexico. During 2015-2016, the research team made four field trips to southern New Mexico, with the assistance of co-PI David DuBois. We conducted 20 interviews with 15 organizations that provide services to low-income populations. Project outputs will include a final report, presentation of preliminary results to New Mexico stakeholders, and an article in a peer-reviewed journal.

The SW Climate Gap project is part of a broader HEAT project in CLIMAS that aims to better characterize cascading effects of extreme heat events, and to document the planning and mitigation efforts under way.

Climate extremes pose serious threats to human health and place increasing demands on municipal services and infrastructure, and they threaten the long-term sustainability of a region. These extremes have implications for rapid response and emergency management, but they also amplify the effects of underlying social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities and have numerous potential long-term consequences in terms of planning for and dealing with potential disasters. In the Southwest, heat presents a unique opportunity to study the intersection between an acute event (e.g., a multi-day heat wave), and underlying vulnerabilities and risks. It also presents an opportunity to look for cross-sector impacts and potential cascades of impacts.

Dust storms in the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico continue to be a serious health and safety issue. This project aims to locate the sources of dust that have impacted people in southwestern New Mexico, northwestern Chihuahua, and west Texas. Researchers continued surveillance of dust storms and determined the latitude and longitude of each event. To better understand the characteristics of the land surface from where the dust emission occurs, researchers identified more than 2,000 locations responsible for a dust plume as seen in satellite imagery and are in the process of understanding the state-of-the-land surface at those locations. Researchers also have started work to construct a synoptic climatology of these dust storms to increase their ability to forecast these events.

Dust storms in the Southwest United States and northern Mexico continue to create serious health and safety issues. In a continued effort to locate the sources of dust, researchers continued surveillance of dust storms and determined the latitude and longitude of these storms.

Findings: Researchers completed their work designing a method to characterize dust storm events using data from the North American Regional Reanalysis model archive. Based on 60 dust storm events, they generated patterns to compare with non-dust days. While that method proved to be successful in identifying dust storms, it also identified other non-dust events. One particular variable that needs to be included in the future is soil moisture.

For more information documenting dust events that impacted New Mexico, northwestern Chihuahua, and west Texas: (http://nmborderaq.blogspot.com/)

For videos published on the New Mexico Climate Center’s YouTube channel to support outreach on climate, air quality, and projects at the New Mexico Climate Center: (https://www.youtube.com/NMClimate).