Most Beijingers woke up on
Monday to find, to their surprise, that a "yellow blanket" has covered up
everything in the open air: from window sills, cars and the ground to every
single leaf on the trees.
"As if the desert has crawled to Beijing overnight," said Zhang Rui, a
citizen in Chaoyang District in eastern Beijing.
He was not exaggerating -- Zhang said he spent at least 15 minutes dusting
the sand off his Jetta sedan.
A sandstorm hitting the China-Mongolia border Saturday and Sunday started to
affect Beijing at midnight on Sunday and by daybreak, the city had turned
yellowish.
"Unlike the particulate matter that often exists in Beijing's air, the
suspending granules hitting the city today are bigger, though still less than
100 microns in diameter," said Wang Xiaoming, an official with the municipal
environment protection bureau. "That's why we feel sand is raining down."
The particulate matter that often hovers over Beijing is mostly less than 10
microns in diameter, he added.
Wang said this is the eighth, as well as the worst, sandy weather that
attacks from outside Beijing this year.
The bureau forecast at 9:00 a.m. that the city's air quality will be level V
or hazardous on Monday, with pollution reading over 301.
The municipal government launched a pollution control scheme Sunday night
hoping to lessen the impact of the sandy weather. The city has sent sprinklers
to wash urban roads and construction sites have been told to halt earthwork.
The city's meteorological bureau predicts drizzle in northern Beijing on
Monday night and says the wind scale will reach five on Tuesday. But neither
will be strong enough to drive away the dust, which will probably stay until
Tuesday evening.
From January 1 to April 17, Beijing has reported 56 "blue sky days", with
excellent or fairly good air quality and pollution reading less than 100, 16
days less than the same period of 2005.
Sandstorms could easily occur at places with little rainfall, scarce
vegetation and frequent gales, said Qiao Lin, an expert China Meteorological
Administration (CMA).
Northern China experiences sandstorms almost every spring. The situation is
worsened by higher temperature this spring and the prolonged drought in northern
China, according to Qiao.
China launched an afforestation project in 2000 in Inner Mongolia Autonomous
Region, which is blamed as source of sandstorm, targeting sandstorm threatening
Beijing and Tianjins, but it is difficult to contain the intensified
desertification.