Beijing has set up new automatic weather stations (AWS) around local sports venues, in order to provide accurate weather forecasts for the 2008 Olympic Games, the Beijing News has reported.

Currently, the city has 176 AWSs, one for every five square kilometers in urban areas and one for every 10 or 15 sq km in the suburbs.

A spokesman for the municipal meteorological bureau said the bureau plans to build up to 15 AWSs for Olympic sites, of which 12 have been completed. The completed stations are in major Olympic venues like Olympic National Park, Shunyi Olympic Aquatic Park, Chaoyang Park, Xiannongtan Stadium, Fengtai Sport Center, Beijing Country Equestrian Park, and the Tennis Center of Olympic National Park.

He said, ‘AWSs in Olympic sites have to meet special requirements such as the ability to measure visibility and total radiation and ultra-violet ray radiation. That is in addition to measuring temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind direction, wind force and precipitation.

‘These AWSs will collect meteorological information at the Olympic venues on a large scale and help local meteorological offices to provide more accurate and timely weather forecasts.’

Weather information will, in part, be processed through a newly purchased IBM System p575 supercomputer, seen in our picture. The System p575 is expected to provide ten times the computational power of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau’s current weather forecasting system.
Source: China Daily