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Q: Suzhou air quality going down the drain ? Why ?!
So, checkout those curves
http://aqicn.org/city/suzhou/m/
As you can see, there's a cyclic variation. Daytime, pollution level are "normal", "only" 100 for PM2.5 concentration level for instance (which is already *not* *good*) But in the evening, it goes through the roof : 500 for PM2.5 concentration level, 700 for PM10 concentration level (!!!) and 200 for ozone concentration levels. Only in the evening, with a few hours late behind with the daily temperature spike. As you can see, it's the 4th evening like that. When the pollution is at its top, it's awful, it smells of burn things and there's a brown-ish smog. Breathing is painful after a bit of exercise.
What the hell is happening ? On Suzhou local government website, nothing about this.
8 years 42 weeks ago in Health & Safety - Suzhou
The correlation between pollution spike and temperature spike, if they are indeed linked, might be due to air-conditioners + non-insulated buildings ? The high temperature would push the air-con usage up, which would push the power usage up, pushing in turn the coal-fired energy plants. A way to confirm that would be a look at the hourly power usage of Suzhou's power plants... But I'm way too bad at Mandarin to get checking that :(
Scandinavian:
sounds plausible + a-holes driving in rush hour traffic
DrMonkey:
Good point, the pollution spikes are close to the time people go back from work. Then the link with daily temperature would be just a coincidence, not a cause. If it's mostly due to traffic from the evening commute, then the pollution spike would be smaller this week-end (less commuters).
Hey doc, not sure if this contributes or not, but here goes. I and my girl drove to Anji last weekend, the mountains were beautiful as was the sky and water. When we were returning the farmers were burning their fields about an hour south west of Suzhou. The smoke was so thick you could barely breathe and visibility was down to about 50 meters.
DrMonkey:
Thanks for the information ! The data shows that those cycles started 4 days ago. The spike of pollution is only in the evening... Do they light fires only at the end of the afternoon ?
CharlieB:
We drove up Saturday morning and saw no fires, when we came back about 5:00 pm on Sunday as we dropped off the mountain on G50 and went through the tunnel on the other side the smoke was choking. I commented to my gf how bad it was, she agreed but said the farmers have always done this.
The only thing that draws more attention to illegal fires and factory emissions than the stink would be the highly visible plume of smoke during the day. So, they minimize their exposure by only burning/emitting at night. They do it around here too. I've seen burning brush piles that looked like they had more than a few tires thrown in for good measure. With all the light pollution and smog, the night is never truly pitch black here, so the super black plume of smoke wasn't too hard to make out.
Shuzhou in Anhui province, which is a horrific shithole of pollution, or the one in Jiangsu province?
CharlieB and cooter are both spot on.
There are like 2 times per year that pollution gets really bad due to people burning down the country side. I've seen thousands of miles literally on fire while traveling by train.
