Near the doorway of the weather-modification room was a relief model of the municipality in tans and greens with white tags marking the bureau facilities. The city proper is dead flat, resting on an inland offshoot of the Huabei coastal plain. Around it is a deep bowl formed by overlapping mountain ranges—the Taihang to the west and the Yan to the north and northwest. Many of the tags, marking firing stations, were scattered on the high ground in Beijing’s rural districts.

A row of past and present cloud-seeding rockets stood on the floor beside the relief map, including an olive, waist-high RYI-6300, the model currently in use. A 37-millimeter silver-iodide antiaircraft shell completed the set. The Beijing bureau buys its equipment from State-Owned Factory No. 556 in Wuhai City, Inner Mongolia, a former military plant that now makes weather-control gear and industrial blasting fuses.

Over the past decade, Beijing has sought to improve its air quality by moving heavy industry out of town to neighboring Hebei Province and the port city of Tianjin. Even the venerable Shougang Iron Works, a mascot of China’s industrial might, is being uprooted for the Olympics. But when the wind blows off the ocean, from the south and the east, it carries the factory-choked air of Hebei and Tianjin up the coastal plain, until the mountains funnel it to a halt over the capital. The city’s Environmental Protection Bureau keeps an annual tally of “blue-sky days” on which air quality falls into the two lowest classes of its five-level pollution scale (at level five, residents are warned to stay indoors and avoid exercise).

Each year brings a new, higher quota of blue-sky days for the city to meet; in 2007, the target was 245 days. The city logged 246, thanks to December 30 and 31—a pair of sunny days that followed a two-week stretch of filthy ones. International media outlets also noted that the government had scored an improbably large number of days that just cleared the cutoff for “blue-sky” status.

Technically, summer is less polluted than other seasons, in part because the lower portion of the atmosphere known as the planetary boundary layer is higher, fewer people are burning coal, and the government doesn’t include ozone—the primary component of smog—in its pollution index. Regardless, Olympic officials are making contingency plans for rescheduling events if certain days are too dirty. Athletes worried about particulates in their lungs may descend on the city wearing filter masks, taking them off for public appearances and competition only. Last year, the International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, expressed his concern to CNN about scheduling “endurance sports like the cycling race, where you have to compete for six hours. These are examples of competitions that might be postponed or delayed to another day."

Weather modification has a vexed and winding history, but China’s position is straightforward: It is the world’s number one nation in the field, however debated the field itself may be.

See more articles from In Depth

Posted on Apr 17, 2008 at 7:57 AM
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)