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Following article appeared in China Daily... Some positive news from China:

An air quality monitoring and warning system to help guarantee clear skies for the Beijing Olympics in August has been fully implemented, scientists have said.

The 20-million-yuan ($2.9 million) project was jointly launched by the Beijing authorities and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Liu Wenqing, the project's chief scientist and a professor of the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics under the CAS, told China Daily recently.

The project includes 11 air quality monitoring stations and three mobile surveillance vehicles that have been deployed in the capital. Another 14 monitoring stations in a dozen cities surrounding Beijing will also provide data.

The information collected is expected to help authorities in the commitment to hold a green Olympics by targeting major polluters.

The project is an extension of a trial held during the "Good Luck Beijing" test events for the Olympics.

Following the trial to monitor air quality, Beijing authorities launched a four-day experiment to see whether pulling 1.3 million cars off the capital's roads each day in an even-and-odd license plate rule that allowed them to drive into the city on alternate days would be effective in reducing air pollution during the Olympics.

During the experiment, the amount of pollutants in the city decreased by 17 to 28 percent, while the daily average pollutant levels met the national standard II, a standard accepted by the International Olympic Committee, Liu said. The traffic control measures can help improve the city's air quality significantly, Liu said.

About 70 percent of the monitoring devices used in the latest project are domestically made hi-tech equipment that measure dozens of pollutants, including nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, methane, ammonia and volatile organic compounds, scientists said. The rest are foreign-made equipment used to measure four types of pollutants - sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and the particulate matter PM 10.

Ulrich Platt, a professor from the Institute for Environmental Physics under the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the initiator of one of the techniques used in the project, praised the air quality monitoring system.

"It is amazing that China achieved such progress in such a short period, almost in sync with developments in developed countries," Platt said in March when he visited the Anhui Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, which produced equipment used in the project.