Multiple project delays ...

Folks,

It has been a long time I updated you on our progress.

As you can imagine, the pandemic has affected this project, as it has all our lives.

In our case though, problems began earlier ... in summer 2019, we lost our local volunteer handling samples for the area as she moved away, and in the fall I lost a great undergraduate student I supported in this project because he graduated. Despite multiple efforts to re-initiate the project in summer and fall 2019, I was unsuccessful to revive and maintain the steady stream of sampling we had in place in spring 2019. I worked with two wonderful teachers from Pecos Middle School, where our weather station is located, and temporarily had a new site in Balmorhea. But both these connections were not ultimately fruitful for various reasons, and we lost data for summer and fall 2019.

I traveled to Pecos in January 2020 to make some updates to the weather station, gave a long interview to a Swiss television crew, and met a potential new volunteer. But it took till March 2020 before I found an enthusiatic retiree to assist with and thus revive the project. Although we no longer have three sampling locations set up as a north-south gradient from Pecos to Balmorhea, measurements in Pecos are active again since late spring. My volunteer is also helping to keep the weather station running as the pandemic put rules in place at Texas A&M that strongly discourage me from traveling ...

Currently, the status is mixed: We are recording weather data but the failure of our power supply caused loss of nighttime data and our ozone instrument is strangely noisy; both issues we may be able to solve in winter 2021. Hydrocarbon samples are arriving in College Station each week, and they still show very high hydrocarbons levels in Pecos, despite the downturn in the oil and gas industry.

Our initial data analysis is summarized in the attached poster we created for a Texas A&M internal virtual poster symposium. They show benzene levels in Pecos, above what the state of Texas considers "save" (1.4 ppb). They also show some interesting results from a survey at the local State Parks carried out by my colleagues in the Department of Recreation, Park & Tourism Sciences.

As we continue analyzing the passive hydrocarbon collectors, the project will wrap up during this winter as we will run out of means to support this activity. We will analyze 2020 samples and hope to submit a manuscript for publication in spring next year.

I will post another update when data become available, likely in mid to late December.