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Blowing dust behind a cold front moving across New Mexico, Texas and Mexico

By Scott Bachmeier •

5-minute GOES-19 Red Visible (0.64 µm) images with plots of 15-minute GOES-19 Derived Motion Winds (yellow/red), hourly Ceiling/Visibility/Weather (cyan), 30-minute Peak Wind Gusts (yellow/red) and 3-hourly Surface Fronts (beige), from 1826 UTC on 19 April to 0101 UTC on 20 April; Interstate highways are plotted in violet [click to play MP4 animation]

Strong winds in the wake of a cold front lofted areas of blowing dust across parts of southern New Mexico, southwestern Texas and northern Mexico on 19 April 2025, as seen in GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible images (above). The peak wind gust at El Paso, Texas (KELP) was 50 kts (58 mph), and blowing dust reduced the visibility to 1/4 mile at Carlsbad, New Mexico (KCNM). GOES-19 Derived Motion Winds indicated that the leading edge of the blowing dust was moving at speeds up to 35 kts across northern Mexico.

Several Blowing Dust Warnings were issued by the NWS Forecast Offices in El Paso and Midland (below), which at times covered parts of Interstates 10 and 20 in New Mexico and Texas.

Same GOES-19 imagery and overlays as above, but including plots of Dust Storm Warning polygons (light brown) [click to play MP4 animation]

Daytime True Color RGB images created using Geo2Grid (below) provided a more distinct view of the blowing dust — and after sunset, Dust RGB images highlighted the airborne dust as shades of magenta. Ahead of the cold front, several wildfires across northern Mexico were producing notable smoke plumes.

5-minute GOES-19 daytime True Color RGB + nighttime Dust RGB images, from 1801 UTC on 19 April to 0601 UTC on 20 April [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

Categories: Air quality, Geo2Grid, GOES-19, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, Satellite winds