Beijing has seen regular air pollution and an unseasonal number of sandstorms over the past few weeks.
Beijing:
State media reported that dense sandstorms would hit Beijing and several provinces by Wednesday, and Chinese forecasters warned citizens of respiratory hazards and very low visibility during travel.
The capital Beijing has seen regular air pollution and unseasonal sandstorms in the past few weeks.
Forecasters have issued a blue weather warning for the sandstorm. China has a four-tier, colour-coded weather-alert system, with red representing the most severe warnings and blue the least severe.
On Tuesday morning, haze and hazy gray clouds could be seen over Beijing and the city’s real-time air quality index was at the severe pollution level, according to the website of the Beijing Municipal Ecological and Environmental Monitoring Center.
According to IQAir, a website that releases air quality data and information, the concentration of fine particles in the air in Beijing is currently 46.2 times the World Health Organization’s annual air quality guideline value.
The Central Meteorological Observatory said a dozen provinces, including Shanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan and Hubei, Inner Mongolia and metropolitan Shanghai would be affected by sandstorms and large dust by 8 a.m. (0000 GMT) on Wednesday .
The sandstorm was again a hot discussion topic on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Weibo, which generated 2.178 million chats.
One user wrote, “What! Why doesn’t anyone issue a leave notice when I wake up, do I still have to go to work in the dust!”
Beijing receives regular sandstorms in March and April because it is near the large Gobi Desert.
A Chinese government official at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment recently said that the number of sandstorms was now four times higher than in the 1960s, a result of rising temperatures and less rainfall in the deserts of northern China and neighboring Mongolia.
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