MEP (SEPA) and BJEPB data
Since March 2008 China has upgraded the State Environmental Protection Agency to the ‘Ministry of Environmental Protection’ (MEP and in English), and it still reports the daily Air Pollution Index (API) for 84 major cities in China; this is the primary data source for most of the analysis on this website.
On the MEP website (recently redesigned, so below links should work):
- Daily API report for 84 major cities - they keep changing this URL and the interface without it getting any better in my opinion - at the topof the page you can use a search function to get a list for any period for any of the 80+ cities, our primary source for the graphs on this blog
- Explanation of API how it is calculated, based on concentrations of SO2, NO2, and fine dust (PM10) - this used to be available in English also, but i can’t find it anymore - now also available from another source
The Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau also publishes daily API data, but only in Chinese. They do have an interesting daily map on their homepage showing the daily measurements of their numerous stations in Beijing, colour coded. You can click on that map to get the detailed numbers per station. There you can see that the API measurements actually vary a lot within the area of Beijing, it can go from 82 to 183 in 2 different locations on the same day! The list of stations has been changing over the past years, and recently in 2008 as discussed on this blog.