Smog in China

I was recently in China for an extended period of time.  While there, I got to experience first-hand the smog which is such a problem for many of the cities in that nation.  This post documents, with photos, the situation.  I stayed in one hotel in Hangzhou for several days, so I could take photos of almost the same view each of several days.  I will show you progressively worse views, and then I'll show you a photo from the day I was able to tour West Lake, one of the biggest tourist spots in all of China.  First, here is the least smoggy day:




Notice that there is a bit of haze. Views of buildings in the background are obviously obscured. This was probably the best air I saw during my visit in Hangzhou. And, to be fair, it was never this good in my days in Hefei, my days in Nanjing, or my day in Wuhan. But here is photo 2, and we can see it's worse.



The buildings which were hazy in the first photo are gone in this photo. But let's move on to photo 3.



Remember, when we were walking around outside, we were breathing that air. But I'm not quite done. One more.



That was the worst I saw, I think. Now, photo 2 is the same day as this photo. This one was in the morning, so later in the day, some of the smog had dispersed.

I mentioned that I would show you a photo from my tour of West Lake. I am going to post several photos from that trip. I really enjoyed the sightseeing walk we took around West Lake, and then the trip on the boat around the lake. I can only imagine what it would look like on a day without smog. Anyway, from the boat, here is a photo of the shore.



I wish I could tell you that the view was obscured by FOG, but it was smog. Now, most of the time it didn't quite look that bad to my eye. I got used to it. So I tried to correct for the smog to get a photo that looks more like what I thought I was seeing. Here's the result.



It was December 7, and the people in southeastern China were still getting to enjoy fall colors. The patches of lotus plants are protected by little fences, so they can come alive again in the spring. Again, as I mentioned, this is more like what I felt I was seeing. There were no clouds in the sky that day, but we could not tell that from down at West Lake. But the smog was thick and heavy.

Someday I would love to return to West Lake to see all of these views without smog. I am told this was a particularly bad day, and I believe it. I have seen bad days in Beijing, but on the trips I took to Beijing this fall, I mostly saw days similar to photo 1 -- hints of smog, but mostly very nice. But when people talk about the smog in China, now you have an idea what they mean.

Update: I just saw this video on weather.com, which has images from NASA and a description of how bad the measured Air Quality Index has been.  FYI, if you're interested:
http://www.weather.com/video/how-is-anyone-able-to-breathe-here-42208