Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Mexican Highlands

Terrain

The Guadalupe Mountains IMPROVE monitoring site is located 8 km (5 mi) southeast of Guadalupe Peak. The monitoring site is technically outside of the class I area (Guadalupe Mountains National Park) at an elevation of 1,674 m (5,492 ft). Terrain in the region is depicted in this detailed terrain map. Complex topography in the vicinity includes mountainous terrain; the highest mountain peak is Guadalupe Mountain (8,749 ft), which is nearly 993 m (3,257 ft) above the monitoring site. The site is located near the top of the NW-SE oriented Delaware Mountain Range. It thus has good exposure to regional scale winds. The site may be influenced by wind blown dust from the dry lake (bare ground) in western Texas, as well as from the Mexican dry/barren region to the southwest. Ground cover in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park is predominantly evergreen and grassland vegetation. Near the monitoring site ground cover is desert vegetation (shrub land and grassland, etc).

Representativeness

Aerosol data collected at the Guadalupe Mountain IMPROVE site should be well representative of visibility conditions within Guadalupe Mountains National Park, especially at exposed mountain top elevations.

Nearby Population/Industrial Centers

Population is sparse in the immediate vicinity of the monitoring site. The monitoring site is 53 miles from Carlsbad (population 25,625), 18 miles from Salt Flat, 23 miles from Dell City, 4 miles from Pine Springs, and 98 miles from El Paso. The nearest major population centers within the U.S. is El Paso, population 563,662 (2000 census) located ~ 157 km (98 mi) west. Across the border from El Paso, the city of Ciudad Juarez is home to almost 2 million people.  Local influences are likely to be primarily windblown dust.

Nearby Data Stations

This map shows the location of the nearest air quality and meteorological monitoring sites. The Guadalupe Mountain RAWS site (elevation 7,755 ft) is a good data source.

For information on regional vertical structure, twice daily upper air sounding data are collected at the NWS upper air site at Santa Teresa, New Mexico, 173 km (108 mi) west of the monitoring site. Vertical temperature profile data from Santa Teresa are probably the best routinely collected and long-term data representative of conditions at Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

Wind Patterns

The monitoring site is well exposed to prevailing synoptic wind patterns, predominantly west to northwesterly in the winter and east to southeasterly in the summer. The Guadalupe Mountain RAWS site has wind records from July 1985 to the present. Guadalupe Mountain Wind Roses show average wind patterns for January 1986 to January 2004. Wind roses show NW-SE flow on the average. Another source for regional wind patterns is from the El Paso International Airport. Very high winds are common in the early spring and can be high during stormy weather year round.

Inversions/Trapping

The monitoring site is on the top of mountain and terrain around the monitoring site is not confining, as in basins and valleys in more mountainous terrain. Strong local trapping inversions are not likely. North-westerly flow in the winter time can be affected by the higher mountains of the Guadalupe Mountain range which is nearly 1 km higher than the IMPROVE station. Local inversion/trapping is not likely to occur due to year-round high winds. Stagnation and inversion/subsidence conditions, if and when they occur, are more likely associated with synoptic high-pressure systems.

Meteorological Statistics

The meteorological/climatological data summary is available from the Guadalupe Mountain Peak RAWS site. Long term climate data is available at El Paso NWS site.