Google shows said person already left Beijing embassy in 2007, and according to state dept [0] the sensor is a team effort led by Erica Keen Thomas.
> PRC Ministry of Environment had accurate sensors before US embassy stunt, they just used 24 hour average instead of live data.
Could you provide a source for China had been publishing pm2.5/pm10/o3/voc/etc data before 2008? Prior to 2016 the obsolete national air quality standard, GB 3095—1996, does not even include pm2.5, how can they report a nonexistent metric?
At the time the gov only publishes verdicts like good/mid/bad with no raw data. It is the US embassy effort that educated the population about objective standards mentioned above and it often contradicted the official verdict. The gov repeatedly asked the embassy to stop, and forced Chinese weather apps to remove the builtin embassy reading for ppl find it more trustworthy.
> They also built out national sensor network early 2010s
Yep thanks to the new standard GB 3095—2012 in effect only from 2016. 24hr avg probably would be the least nefarious trick the gov employed to fudge the numbers. They actually did,
- build sensors in scenic areas instead of city proper, the equivalent of instead of Manhattan, NYC reads its AQI from some national park only technically within border.
- put sensors in a box so gov can install filter on bad days, or they are conveniently broken or put offline when needed.
- spray water around the sensor, hence even nowadays you can see water sprinkler trucks roaming Chinese cities, despite its utter uselessness in reducing pm2.5 on city scale.
- Force B2C sites like Taobao to delist any air quality sensors.
- Since objective readings are hard to fudge, the gov chooses to play with the subjective index instead, so the standard of the aggregate index, Air Quality Index, is laxly defined and even more laxly enforced. They forced weather apps to adopt it so at first glance everything looks good just like the old days. Here is yet another hilarious fact, a popular mod that ppl install along with VPN on their iPhones is to mitm the weather app so that the AQI reading follows US standard instead of Chinese, also like the good ol' days.
[0]: https://diplomacy.state.gov/online-exhibits/diplomacy-is-our...
I didn't say official presented PM2.5 prior. I said they had accurate sensors... which they've had for 1996 standard. There's no qualitive difference between old standard telling people living under yellow skies the air quality is bad via good/mid/bad (and it was basically mostly bad) vs US presenting it via AQI#? Hence the stunt, a successful stunt, nvm patchy sensors over a few rooftops is manifestly not accurate way to extrapolate broader AQI. Regardless point is not how successful stunt was, but 2007 and before, PRC had accurate air sensors.
> FLG conspiracy rant diversion ... fudge... subjective index... aggregate index
I've seen all these exaggerated bullet points from FLG rag before, yeah a few local govs stuck cotton in filters (and got punished), recall of defective sensors when there's already 10s of millions of residential air purifies with AQI meters around. There's 100-1000s of sensors in broad urban/regional coverage for a reason. Instead US embassy/consulate readings that only provided patchy coverage, central gov gets to process 100s of data points (which btw mitigates local gov tomfoolery)... aka a statistically better method. Of course some iphone owning PRC baizuo shitlibs who always thinks US standards better with eat muh embassy AQI slop, but that has no baring on claim that US embassy AQI being more accurate because it technically couldn't due to lack of coverage. Even if PRC fudged their numbers - US embassy setup itself inherently cannot provide more accuracy outside a few kms, ever, hence stunt. Also c'mon popular weatherkit modding is so vanishingly niche on PRC scale it statistically doesn't exist.