Air Quality Forecasts for 2008 Olympic Games (Forwarded)

ESA News
http://www.esa.int

22 July 2008

Air Quality Forecasts for China

With less than a month remaining before the Beijing Olympics, Chinese
officials have introduced a series of measures to improve air quality for
the Games. A new tool has been installed in the capital city to allow the
Chinese to monitor the effectiveness of these efforts.

Poor air quality could pose problems for the Olympic athletes and hinder the
performance of those competing outdoors in endurance sports, such as cycling
and marathons.

Since the main source of air pollution in the Beijing urban area is vehicle
emissions, restrictions on car traffic began on 20 July in order to take 50
percent of Beijing's 3.5 million vehicles off the road.

From then until 20 September, private vehicles will only be allowed to drive
on alternating days and cars with high emissions will be banned.

On behalf of ESA, CERC (Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants)
installed a High Resolution Air Quality Forecasting System at the Beijing
Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) that allows Chinese
authorities to monitor the effect these cuts have on street level air
quality.

"We are delighted to have installed the system in Beijing and believe the
detailed air quality forecast it provides will prove a valuable tool in
predicting and understanding Beijing's Air quality," David Carruthers from
CERC said.

"The system is highly flexible and can be adjusted rapidly, for example, to
take account of the special emission reduction actions being implemented
during July until after the Games."

Thanks to this new tool, operational street scale air quality forecasts for
Beijing have been generated since 8 July -- exactly one month before the
Games' opening ceremony.

Three-day forecasts are posted daily and are accessible on the Beijing Air
Quality website www.beijingairquality.cn . The forecasts are high-resolution
pollution contour maps that predict levels of nitrogen dioxide, ozone,
particles and sulphur dioxide for each of Beijing's eight districts. Users
can choose to view maps of each pollutant separately or to view the total
health index with all pollutants combined.

"The final forecasts utilise a combination of air quality measurements,
surface data and modelling. Regional modelling using Chimere is provided by
the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and detailed local
modelling is done by CERC's model, ADMS-Urban," Carruthers explained.

Li Kunsheng, EPB Vice Director said he welcomed the installation of the new
system and looked forward to it becoming an important tool for forecasting
air quality in Beijing taking account of the effects of air pollution
management measures including those being implemented for the Olympic Games.

The three-day advanced forecasts are made available as part of the Dragon-2
Programme, a joint undertaking between ESA and the Ministry of Science and
Technology (MOST) of China designed to encourage increased exploitation of
ESA and Chinese Earth Observation (EO) satellite data within China.

Satellite data from the SCIAMACHY and OMI instruments will be included into
the regional model in the near future to improve further emission
monitoring.

SCIAMACHY (Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric
Chartography) is one of 10 instruments aboard ESA's Envisat satellite.

OMI (Ozone Monitoring Instrument) was built by a team of European industry
and scientists led by the Netherlands and supplied as an additional
instrument to the NASA EOS-AURA mission.

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