The two main tech giants i.e. Microsoft and IBM are collaborating to come up with something that could enhance safety measures in air quality of China pacific.
Bouts of acrid smog enveloping Beijing prompted authorities in the Chinese capital to declare two unprecedented “red alerts” this month – a warning to the city’s 22 million inhabitants that heavy pollution is expected for more than three days. Such alerts need to be implemented after specific forecast.
Official interest has also been boosted by China’s preparations to host the Winter Olympics – Beijing’s smog is worse in the colder months in year 2022.
“There is increasing attention to the air quality forecast service. More and more people care about this information technology.” – Researcher at Microsoft, Yu Zheng
“If you can predict the weather, it only takes a few more variables to predict air quality.” – Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth, a US-based non-profit organization that maps China’s real-time air pollution.
Forecasts can help governments plan when to close schools and airports, restrict vehicles or postpone sporting events, and also decide which polluting factories to shut down temporarily. Both Microsoft and IBM secured their first government clients last year after developing their respective pollution forecasting technologies at their China-based research labs.
For its part, Microsoft has signed up China’s environment ministry, and the environmental protection bureaus in Fujian province and Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan.
The company launched a “Joint Environmental Innovation Centre” — staffed by government and IBM scientists — with the bureau earlier in December, allowing officials to better model pollution reduction scenarios during the worst episodes. IBM’s first client was the city of Beijing’s environmental protection bureau, which bases its colour-coded pollution alerts on the technology.
Apart from this, already more than 30 solar farms in China are using IBM’s forecasting technology, which can also help predict the availability of sunlight. Microsoft has created a website called Urban Air and a smartphone app with a 48-hour forecast for cities across China, while the China Open tennis tournament put two-day IBM pollution forecasts for parks across Beijing on its public WeChat social messaging account.
