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Severe Smog in Beijing Prompts Smog Research

posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-you-could-see-me-now dept.

hankwang writes:

"For the past couple of days, China's capital has been suffering under severe smog, leaving the sun and skyscrapers barely visible. The highest concentration of small airborne particles (PM2.5) was 0.50 mg per cubic meter, a factor 20 above the Word Health Organization's safe limit. Scientists went as far as comparing this to a nuclear winter. The worst seems to be over for now: today, the monitors are reading 0.180 mg/m3, only a factor 7 above the WHO limit.

The Chinese smog seems to behave differently from the smog in Europe and the US. Existing scientific models developed in the West do not work well. To improve the models and understanding, plans are underway to build a 600 cubic-meter (that's 21,000 cubic ft or 160,000 US gallon) transparent dome as a smog chamber."

[NOTE TO EDITOR: I can't get slashcode to display the mu symbol, so I converted to milligrams] [Ed's Note: Thankyou - but what is it in firkins?]

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Iskender on Monday March 03 2014, @02:04AM

    by Iskender (470) on Monday March 03 2014, @02:04AM (#9923)

    [NOTE TO EDITOR: I can't get slashcode to display the mu symbol, so I converted to milligrams]

    Uhh, that symbol stands for MICRO, not milli. So you're multiplying the amount by 1000 there. If you can't get the symbol to work, the recommended approach is to just write it out: microgram.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by hankwang on Monday March 03 2014, @03:27AM

    by hankwang (100) on Monday March 03 2014, @03:27AM (#9937) Homepage

    That symbol stands for MICRO, not milli. So you're multiplying the amount by 1000 there. If you can't get the symbol to work,

    Why is this marked "informative"? If you had bothered to RTFAs, you would have noticed that they were talking about 500 micrograms/m3, which is nicely converted to 0.50 milligrams/m3 in the summary.

    • (Score: 1) by Iskender on Monday March 03 2014, @10:53AM

      by Iskender (470) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:53AM (#10057)

      Okay, my bad.

      Also, what's this "article" you're talking about? :)