With several friends competing at the Beijing games the office has been following the stories about pollution and its possible impact on the games very closely. The best analogy a friend of mine gave after a practice at the rowing venue was “it is like training at altitude”. We thought it might be useful to build a map showing the daily pollution levels in different parts of Beijing on a map that included the Olympic venues.

Raj found a Chinese government source for daily pollution levels in Beijing then geocoded it for us. Andrew used Mapufacture to turn the data into a dynamic geocoded feed, so we could put it on the map and have it updated in real time. Finally Bill used Finder to create a data set with all the Olympic venues. The whole thing came together in a day and we’ve embedded the map below. You can also go to Mapufacture and grab the embed for yourself or the KML and keep track of it in Google Earth or another compliant GeoBrowser.

The icons with the Olympic rings are Olympic venues and the orange squares with the Mandarin character for “atmosphere” are pollution sensors. When you click on the environmental data you’ll see totals for three different pollutants:

1) SO2 - Sulfur Dioxide
2) PM10 - Particulate Matter- that is 10 micrometers in diameter or less
3) NO2 - Nitrogen Dioxide

These three measurement compose the API - the air pollution index. The USA and Canada both use AQI, air quality index, which is similar to API but the indices are set according to different formulas based upon concentration. Therefore, one cannot compare API or AQI between countries without knowing what concentration is represented by the indices.

API Rating (Beijing)

0-50 Grade I (Excellent)

51-100 Grade II (Good)

101-200 Grade III (Lightly Polluted)

201-300 Grade IV (Moderately Polluted)

300+ Grade V (Seriously Polluted)

Interestingly Honk Kong uses the same API index but how they rank between “seriously polluted” and “excellent” is far different.

To keep things honest we used the Honk Kong scale for the map we created. If you would like to do some comparisons (knowing the formulas) of API in Beijing to AQI in other cities you can check out the EPA data set in Finder with AQI for major urban counties in the USA.

*Special thanks to Andrew’s wife Corrie for deciphering the enviro science for us. If you would like to get the PhD. version check out her blog on the topic here.

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