China’s well known for its pollution problem, and few cities are more notorious than its capital Beijing, where smog and dust is believed to be the cause of thousands of premature deaths each year. People are fed up, and this anger has led authorities to declare war on pollution, with the goal of cutting Beijing’s PM2.5 (air particle concentration) by 25 percent in the next two years.

Achieving this goal is no easy feat. Beijing is surrounded on three sides by smog-trapping mountains, and the pollution comes from numerous sources, which makes it difficult to know where to start fixing the problem.

Now IBM has been drafted in to try and turn the situation around. On Monday, it unveiled a 10-year intiative that aims to deal with pollution, improve the country’s energy system and better protect China’s citizen’s health. The project, dubbed “Green Horizon”, will focus on air quality management, renewable energy management and energy optimization within China’s heavy industries. IBM’s experts have already set about trying to tackle Beijing’s air pollutants, and the plan of attack calls for harnessing the power of Big Data analytics, supercomputing and weather modelling.

Dirty data

Beijing officials already have lots of data about the city’s air quality. It uses this information to decide when to close down nearby factories and schools, and when to limit the number of cars on the road, if PM2.5 levels get too high. These measures help clear the smog, but can be extremely disruptive to people’s lives.

Wang Tao, a climate and energy scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, admits that the data could be a lot better, however. “If you don’t know exactly what is the source, how it’s interacting in the air and how it’s dispersing across the city it is more difficult to tackle it,” says Wang. “What they really need is advanced technology and science to help them understand what measures must be taken.”

Sample user interface from IBM’s Hyref energy forecasting system

IBM is planning to install its next generation of optical sensors to improve the quality of that data. The effort will incorporate meteorological satellite data and be crunched by supercomputer technologies, generating a visual map that identifies dispersal patterns and the sources of pollutants within Beijing, up to 72 hours in advance.

It’s one thing to properly understand the pollution, but it’s quite another to tackle it. Luckily, the Green Horizon project doesn’t stop there – IBM is also planning to use weather modelling and Big Data analytics to forecast the availability of intermittent renewable energy sources like solar and wind power. This should help the city to limit the amount of wasted energy. Finally, IBM is also developing a system that will help industries to use energy more efficiently.

The theory is that by cutting down on energy use – particularly fossil fuels (China uses lots of coal) – this should lead to less pollutants being pumped into Beijing’s air. In the short term, the focus on monitoring air quality should have a more immediate impact, at least in terms of showing people the government genuinely wants to tackle this problem. As Wang notes, a lot of Beijing residents ignore measures design to slash auto emissions, because they suspect the government is only using them to squeeze more tax revenues.

“Even in Beijing, the general public doesn’t feel that confident about what the government tells it to do,” he said. But because “IBM is a renowned [for] advanced technologies [the government] will be able to improve the accuracy and the authority of the analysis. People will have to realize they are part of the problem to be part of the solution.”

People are already getting excited. Dong Jin, an engineer working for IBM, said he’s already seeing evidence of this happening.

“Even my eight-year-old boy is very excited when I mentioned what’s going on with the program and how it can help the city… have better air quality,” said Jin. “We live here. A lot of our families are here too. When we tell them what we’re doing—it’s a pressing need and they’re very excited.”

photo credit: the measure of mike via photopin cc; Sample user interface via IBM.