Forecast for the Olympics: smoggy with a chance of clearing - July 31, 2008
The air in Beijing is still dirty, and the Olympic planners aren't happy about it.
Since 20 July, cars on the city's roadways have been restricted to an odd/even license-plate restriction - but that doesn't seem to be helping the city's notorious smog, media reports note (Los Angeles Times). A local environmental official apparently said last weekend that the city had reached its air-quality goals for the Games -- but an outside expert notes that two air-monitoring stations downtown seem to have been dropped from that analysis, to be replaced with stations in Beijing's far outer reaches. Officials are already talking about kicking in extra pollution-control efforts, such as shutting down 220 more factories or yanking even more cars off the roads (Washington Post).
The vagaries of weather may now be the best hope for clear skies at the opening ceremonies. Never one to leave weather to chance, the government has amassed a massive cloud-seeding program that in most years is targeted at bringing rain to drought-parched farmers, but for 8 August may be used to cause damp-looking clouds to rain out before reaching the Olympic stadium. China's weather-modification schemes are fascinating in scale -- more than 30,000 people are employed to operate 35 specially equipped planes, 7,000 anti-aircraft cannons and 5,000 rocket launchers (see earlier Nature feature on this, subscription required). If there's a cloud that looks like it's even thinking about raining, these are the guys to take it out.
Weather weenies can get their meteorological fix with a new daily newspaper called the Olympic Weather News, put out by the China Meteorological Administration (China Daily). Sadly it appears you can only get a copy in Beijing.
