Pollution days are down.
The magic number was 245, as in 245 sunny days a year. We just got the result and there were 246 sunny days in Beijing in 2007. What count as a sunny day you may ask, well apparently it has more to do with pollution index that the sun.
“These agencies collect data from monitoring stations around the city and calculate an Air Pollution Index (API) indicating the potential harm to human health, with a range of 1-500. An API of 100 or less is a "blue sky" day. Annual targets for the number of "Blue Sky" days are set for Beijing and other major cities in China. On Jan. 1, the government announced "blue sky" days had improved to 246 last year, up from 100 in 1998
What wasn't reported, though, was a change in collection methods. The Beijing API is an average of data from selected monitoring stations. From 1998 to 2005, the same seven stations -- located in the city center -- were used to measure air quality. In 2006, however, just as international scrutiny on China's air quality was increasing, two stations monitoring traffic were dropped from the city API calculations, while three additional stations in less polluted areas were added.
Pollution levels on a typical day in Beijing, some researchers say, are nearly five times above World Health Organization standards for safety”
 |
| Does it count as a sunny day? |
