Zhuhai holds onto third place with fine air quality

Once again, air quality in the City of Zhuhai was rated in the top three of 74 cities during August and so far in 2017.

The August ranking by the Ministry of Environmental Protection is six notches higher than last year's. It reported on Sept 19 that Zhuhai was the only Guangdong city to reach the top 10. Haikou and Lhasa lead the list. Below Zhuhai's August are Lishui, Dalian, Guiyang, Xining, Harbin, and Zhongshan.

The first three places on the January-August list are occupied by the same cities. The remaining seven top ten spots were taken by Zhoushan, Lishui, Shenzhen, Huizhou, Xiamen, Guiyang and Fuzhou.

The ratio of days with fine air quality within the monitored group dropped by 2.8 percentage points to 78.3 percent, according to Liu Zhiquan, head of the Department of Environmental Monitoring of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. 

Superb air quality in Zhuhai [Photo courtesy Zhuhai Daily]

Zhuhai, however, met air quality standards over 97.1 percent of monitored days from January to August, an increase of 0.4 percent from a year earlier. National Grade-I and II quality levels were met on 233 days.

Over the 74 cities, the average concentration of PM 2.5 was 42 mcg per cubic meter, and that of PM10 was 74 mcg per cubic meter, a year-on-year decrease of 2.3 percent and 1.3 percent respectively.

The monthly mean indicator of PM 2.5 for Zhuhai was 25 mcg per cubic meter in the first eight months, a year-on-year increase of 8.7 percent, while that of PM 10 concentration was 35 mcg per cubic meter, a year-on-year decrease of 7.9 percent.

Monitored jurisdictions include the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region, Yangtze and Pearl river deltas, capital cities, and other municipalities specifically designated for this purpose in state plans.