City of sand and smog prepares for a dusty spring(2)

With a new round of cold fronts passing through the country, the dusty conditions are expected to end and temperatures may drop by up to 14 C before Saturday, bringing snowstorms to parts of Northeast China, said Wang Guanlan, chief weather forecaster of the center, on Thursday.

The Beijing meteorological bureau warned residents that the air pollution from smog in Beijing will gradually change into dust pollution from March.

Many residents in Beijing wore face masks on Thursday.

"It is pollution, it doesn't matter if it is from haze or dust," Wu Jialu, a 30-year-old woman in Beijing told China Daily while wearing her mask with a carbon filter.

She bought dozens of such masks online and planned to wear them when outside until May.

Wu's preparation for the bad weather and air pollution was given a thumbs up from an atmosphere composition professor, who said hazy and dusty weather may become frequent if pollutants in the atmosphere are not cut.

"Take Beijing for example. According to our monitoring, from 2008 to 2009, the pollutants in the atmosphere reduced dramatically, so we got more blue skies. But after 2010, pollutants soured," said Wang Yaqiang, deputy director of atmosphere composition institute at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences.

To improve the capital's air quality during the Olympic Games in 2008, Beijing shut down 150 heavily polluting chemical engineering and cement factories, and more than 70 percent of government vehicles were banned from the roads and strict traffic controls were imposed.

"Only when we effectively reduce the emission of pollutants will blue skies return," he said.