To protect "Rugao blue", the city focuses on green development and builds automatic atmospheric monitoring stations in 14 townships and sub-districts, achieving full coverage. [Photo/ntfabu.com]

In the first 10 months of 2020, the average concentration of PM2.5 in Rugao, a county-level city administered by Nantong in East China's Jiangsu province, was 32.4 micrograms per cubic meter, a year-on-year decrease of 19 percent. The percentage of days with excellent and fairly good air quality was 84.9 percent, a year-on-year growth of 7.3 percent.

"The increase of 'Rugao blue' is the result of strict supervision and control of atmospheric pollution," said Huang Xiaoqin, head of Rugao ecology and environment bureau. "We applied technologies and deployed a 'sky-eye' network to conduct all-region, full-time monitoring of key data such as PM2.5."

In the monitoring center of the Rugao bureau, Ye Kai, a staff member in charge of the operation and maintenance of the monitoring system, opened the environment and air digital management platform, with the distribution and location of various air quality monitoring points in the city immediately shown on a large screen.

"The figure shown above is the value of PM2.5 measured in the last hour," Ye said. "We can see the real-time value of each pollution factor at the same time, and we can also see the air quality index at each monitoring point."

To protect "Rugao blue", the city has focused on green development and built automatic atmospheric monitoring stations in 14 townships and sub-districts, achieving full coverage.

"The newly built monitoring points were put into use in September," said Wang Hanjie, an official from the Rugao ecology and environment bureau.

"Together with the two original provincial-controlled stations, all stations have been connected to the Rugao data management platform, to provide a basis for accurate decision-making on scientific haze control and precise pollution control."