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The
capital Beijing has seen regular air pollution and an unseasonal
number of sandstorms over the past few weeks.
Forecasters issued a blue weather alert warning for sandstorms.
China has a four-tier, color-coded weather-warning system, with
red representing the most severe warning and blue the least
severe.
On Tuesday morning, smog and misty grey clouds could be seen
enveloping Beijing and the city's real-time air quality index
was at a serious pollution level, according to the website of
the Beijing Municipal Ecological and Environmental Monitoring
Center.
The concentration of fine particulates in the air in Beijing is
currently 46.2 times the World Health Organization's annual air
quality guideline value, according to IQAir, a website that
issues air quality data and information.
A dozen provinces, including Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong,
Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan and Hubei, Inner Mongolia and metropolis
Shanghai, will be affected by sandstorms and major dust until 8
a.m. (0000 GMT) Wednesday, the Central Meteorological
Observatory said.
The sandstorms were again a hot discussion topic on Weibo,
China's Twitter-like social media platform, racking up 2.178
million chats.
One user wrote, "What! When I wake up, why doesn't anyone issue
a holiday notice, do you still have to go to work in the dust
today!"
Beijing has regular sandstorms in March and April as it is near
the large Gobi desert.
A Chinese government official at the Ministry of Ecology and
Environment recently said the number of sandstorms was now four
times higher than in the 1960s, a consequence of rising
temperatures and lower precipitation in the deserts of north
China and neighboring Mongolia.
(Reporting by Bernard Orr; Editing by Sonali Paul)
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