Breaking records - continued
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.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Great work. Check out the Beijing EPB site - they have switched up the monitors for the first time since at least 2003, and disabled the historical data. Feel free to email me - the old list is only available via google cache.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
The Beijing Bureau website seems no longer to be available without a password!
January 15th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Hi, I see virtually the exact same view as these photos, since we are neighbors (hi Neighbor!) My marker for a “bad” day before the air stats come out is the smokestack out in/near Wangjing, due North of our apartment.
Some days, I can’t see that sucker at all. Today, it’s hazy but visible…..chugging out tons of the white stuff.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Hi Liora,
FYI, most of the “white stuff” from that plant is water whilst the real reason for the smoke in Beijing is coming from the smaller coal fired boiler plants and individual stoves around Beijing (including the neighbouring cities and towns). Unfortunately most of the “polluting pictures” and “photo shots” are coming from the cooling towers of the power plants which actually are just condensed water.
The real issue of pollution is about the small indivual stoves around the urban areas where residents are burning everything which can be burned (cheap coal, wood, corn stalks, plastic etc. etc.).
The district heating systems in Beijing (and some other cities as well) utilise the waste heat from power (electricity) generation and by this way increase the total efficiency of the whole energy process up to 80…90% instead of the condensing type of electricity production (like in the big poer plants in Inner Mongolia) where the efficiency is running in the figures between 30 to 40%. This mode of combined heat and power (CHP) is the standard solution in Nordic countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Some of the Chinese cities have adopted this model and I believe that this will be the model in the futurealso for China.
January 29th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Thank you, Osmo! That makes total sense. Water Vapor, of course.