New Mexico's Environment
This page shows three separate things: the air people breathe (EPA monitors), the toxic chemicals industrial facilities report releasing (EPA TRI), and where drought is hitting right now (U.S. Drought Monitor). We keep them apart because they're different problems, and this tool won't tell you which county has it worst overall. Pick a card to set the map, click your county, or search your address.
Map layers. The burden is not spread evenly across a county
Loading New Mexico environmental data…
Click a county on the map for its air quality, toxic-release, and current drought picture, plus how it stands versus the rest of the state on each.
Air quality comes from EPA's annual AQI by county, 2023 (aqs.epa.gov): good, moderate, and unhealthy days plus median AQI. Only the roughly 15 New Mexico counties with an EPA monitor show up. A blank county is not certified clean, it is unmeasured. Toxic releases come from EPA's Toxics Release Inventory, 2023 (data.epa.gov): pounds of listed chemicals released on and off site, reported by the facilities themselves, and mapped to their exact locations (lat/long), because releases happen at a plant, not evenly across a county. That misses pollution nobody reports, and pounds are not the same as hazard (a pound of one chemical is not a pound of another). Drought is the U.S. Drought Monitor for the most recent week (usdmdataservices.unl.edu): the share of each county in severe drought (D2) or worse. Trends over time use EPA AQI and TRI back to 2015, U.S. Drought Monitor history, and a 50-year Albuquerque climate record (NOAA, via the ACIS service). The 2035 figure just extends the observed trend in a straight line, an "if this keeps up" number, not a downscaled climate projection. This page describes conditions so people can respond to them. It never ranks whose community matters more. How this data may & may not be used →