[Stoves] Air quality in Ulaanbaatar, winter of 2014

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Stovers

 

As you know the stove exchange and subsidy programme in Ulaanbaatar
continues. Something like 160,000 stoves out of maybe 200,000 have been
changed to ‘approved’ products which are all at least 90% cleaner than the
baseline traditional stove.  

 

Each year the November maximum PM10 values  usually hit 4000µg/m3 a couple
of times. You will have heard that Beijing has an ‘alert’ at 150 and shuts
down factories at 300. So 4000 or 5000 is ‘really terrible’. You can see a
set of a year of photos at https://twitter.com/UB_Air posted by Christa
Hasenkopf on Dec 6th. It says ‘a year’ but they look mixed because summer is
really clean. 

 

Downtown, there was no average PM2.5 value above 500 in November this year
(that is not the same measurement as PM10). To give a little context, there
are several PM10 measuring stations in UB but only one for PM2.5 that tweets
readings in English and Mongolian every 3 hours. It is outside Prof
Lodoysamba’s office window. You can follow the UB_Air feed and watch history
in the making.

 

On Dec 5 the daytime reading was 227 (average 9-12 noon) then rose to 604
average (6 PM to 9 PM) and dropped by midnight to 439. That is the biggest
value I can see so far this season.

 

Some of the ger districts will be worse but I haven’t seen that data yet.
However, it looks like the stove programme is having a huge, positive
impact.

 

Regards

Crispin

 

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