Chinese forecasters have advised citizens of respiratory dangers and very low visibility while travelling as thick sandstorms are expected to hit Beijing and several provinces through Wednesday.
Regular air pollution and an unseasonal number of sandstorms have been recorded in Beijing over the past few weeks.
Forecasters issued a blue weather alert warning for sandstorms. China has a four-tier, color-coded weather-warning system, with red representing the most severe warning and blue the least severe.
Smog and misty grey clouds were seen enveloping Beijing earlier on Tuesday and according to the website of the Beijing Municipal Ecological and Environmental Monitoring Center, the city’s real-time air quality index was at a serious pollution level.
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The concentration of fine particulates in the air in Beijing is currently 46.2 times the World Health Organization’s annual air quality guideline value, according to IQAir, a website that issues air quality data and information.
The Central Meteorological Observatory said a dozen provinces, including Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan and Hubei, Inner Mongolia and metropolis Shanghai, will be affected by sandstorms and major dust until 8 a.m. (0000 GMT) Wednesday.
Beijing has regular sandstorms in March and April as it is near the large Gobi desert.
The number of sandstorms was now four times higher than in the 1960s, a consequence of rising temperatures and lower precipitation in the deserts of north China and neighbouring Mongolia, a Chinese government official at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment said recently.
Story was adapted from Reuters.
