BeijingAirblog.com

Today SEPA published an API of 500 for 28 December 2007, that actually means the the average from 12:00 noon 27 Dec to 12:00 noon 28 Dec as explained here. As we can see on the Beijing bureau website, most monitoring stations noted 500, with the lucky people in Miyun (the far northeast of Beijing province) the only ones staying under 200. AFP quotes the BEPB ‘this is as bad as it can get’ and reports that the Beijing Evening Newspaper did warn residents to skip their outdoor morning exercises.

Due to strong winds this morning, the situation looks a lot better, as you can see on the below pictures taken at 14:00, compared to my post of a couple of days ago. Visibility seems to be more than 1km again.

Today 27 December 2007 SEPA reports an API of 421 for Beijing; that is the worst day this year. In 2006 we actually had 5 days that were even worse, with API 500, that is the maximum value, the system does not record higher numbers. If we look closer at all monitoring stations in Beijing, we see that this 500 level was reached in many locations today throughout the city. The lucky people in Changping and Miyun stayed under 200.

This morning 10am i took this picture from our window; i estimate the visibility was 250 meters. Amazingly there seems to have been no significant flight delays at the airport, at least not more than usual.

SEPA calls any API above 300 ‘heavily polluted’ and gives this advise: ‘The aged and patients should stay indoors and avoid strength draining; the ordinary should avoid outdoor activities.’ The only reason i went outside today is to buy a new filter cartridge for our air filter. Below picture shows new filter on the right, and old one of left, after 6 months use in Beijing, Lido area. Also bought a new vacuum cleaner with HEPA filter.

With an API of 280 on 25 December, and 269 on 26 December, i wish we would have left on holiday a bit earlier. This is really horrible, the 2 worst days of the year, except for 5 January which had 322. On a really good day, we can see the China World III tower and the new CCTV tower (first image, 28 Oct 2007, API=27, 5th best day of the year), but this last week it has been like the second picture, one grey mass, not even enough light to take a sharp picture (26 Dec 2007, API=269, 3rd worst day of the year).

If i am not mistaken, we stand at 244 ‘clear/blue sky days’ at the moment, and it does not look like we’ll be able to add one more this year to get to the target of 245. This count does not include 20 August because there is no data on the SEPA website for this day, it was the last day of the 4-day experiment with car restrictions, and somehow the measurement for 20 August seems to have been lost.

December has not been a good month for Beijing’s air quality; NASA offers this satellite image taken on 17 Dec, where we see a giant cloud of haze covering the East China plains (thanks to Danwei for the link). Beijing’s API was only 78 that day, indeed a ‘Clear Sky Day’! According to SEPA data, the 4 near cities of Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Qinhuangdao, Taiyuan, all had APIs higher than Beijing on that day, which is quite unusual, so i really don’t know what to think about the Beijing numbers anymore.. (also see my page local vs regional)

In the above graph we see that we only got 12 ‘Clear Sky Days’ out of 20 so far this month, which is slightly below the target of 67% (245 days per year). The average API for these 20 days is 101, which corresponds to a PM10 concentration of 150 microgram/m3 which is by all standard really really bad. In fact, in Belgium, my native country, these last few days there are special temporary measures to reduce the maximum highway speed from 120km/hr to 90km/hr because the authorities expect increased levels of fine dust (PM10), above 70 microgram/m3 which is alarming in Europe, but only half of what we have here on average!

This picture comes from Belgium’s monitoring authority IRCEL; it shows the alarming situation (to European standards) that about half of the country (orange-red area) has a PM10 higher than 70 micrograms/m3 (which corresponds to an API of 60), and that our average level in Beijing of 150 micrograms/m3 (API 100) is really far into the red, hardly reached in Belgium on the worst days!

Still a long way to go for Beijing, but yesterday i was extremely happy to see that at last a bike rental network is expanding throughout the city with more than 50 rental points, and flexible terms. The target is to have 50,000 rental bikes out there for the Olympics.