

Graphing Air Pollution in China - bellajara
http://kopf.github.com/chineseair/

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taylorwc
Wondering what the massive, yet brief, spikes in Guangzhou are...the ceiling
of the Hazardous category of the AQI is capped at 500. That would mean that
readings like the 1/12/13 of 827 are quite literally 'off-the-chart.'

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roc
The safe bet would be some atmospheric event that concentrated existing
pollution. Any new pollution _generation_ event would be expected to have more
impact on the baseline, right?

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taylorwc
Did a bit more poking around. Could be a temperature inversion causing a spike
([http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/climate/TemperatureInversions.ph...](http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/climate/TemperatureInversions.php)).
Would be heavily dependent on the location of the sensor and surrounding
topography, which all fits. If I find time, I might overlay weather data and
see what it looks like.

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zht
this is really cool!

it'd be even cooler if you could use data for some large, densely populated US
cities as benchmarks, adjusted for time zone differences

I know anecdotally that the air in Chinese cities is bad, but I've never been
really sure how much worse it is than say, LA, or NYC

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aeflash
Here's some good data for the Los Angeles area:

<http://www.aqmd.gov/smog/Forecast.htm>

[http://www3.aqmd.gov/webappl/aqdetail/AirQualityParameterDat...](http://www3.aqmd.gov/webappl/aqdetail/AirQualityParameterData.aspx?Stationid=70087&AreaNumber=1&res=1152)

Click on "Historical Data" to create a graph.

Bottom line, LA seems to hover around 25 µg/m³.

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paulocal
I wanna see Xi'an's levels. I've been to Shanghai and Beijing and they are
nowhere near as bad as Xi'an.

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kibwen
I'm not sure if there's a historical archive of the official Beijing city
readings, but if so I'd love to see those figures interposed with the
unofficial Beijing embassy readings.

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nirvanatikku
ah, I would love to see HK's levels..

