100 taxis in Jinan at work to monitor air quality

Speakers: Wu Manling and Sam Duckett

[Photo: from VCG]

Jinan has deployed a new army of air pollution monitors.

Air quality monitors installed on 100 taxis are capable of measuring atmospheric particulate matter such as PM2.5 and PM10, generating data every three seconds and transmitting location and measurements in real time.

The taxis are estimated to travel over 23,000 kilometers a day and cover over 95 percent of the roads in Jinan, home to over seven million people and capital of Shandong Province.

The city's environment protection agency says the advantage of using taxis is that they go everywhere within the city and leave no corner unturned.

A total of 1.2 million sets of data will be generated every day, and the taxis are only the first batch of cars to be deployed in the mobile monitoring of air quality.

North China, including Jinan to the south of Beijing, is under intense pressure to meet clean air targets, particularly in winter, when residential heating systems are switched on, typically in mid-November.

[The audio clip is from Studio+, produced by CRI.]