China will launch a nationwide monitoring and early warning system for sandstorms this month, which is expected to cut the country's economic losses by at least 245 million yuan (US$ 30 million) per year, experts say.

The estimation is based on the present frequency of the destructive storms, which occur 18 to 20 times a year, hitting mainly north China, particularly its northwestern region.

Sources in this capital of northwest Gansu Province said the monitoring and early warning system will perform data collection, transmission, processing and database management and study the cause and development of sandstorms, sound alarms and evaluate their potential harm.

Upon completion, the system will be helpful to governments at all levels in their decision-making process, and will provide integrated meteorological services to ordinary citizens and other users, said Xie Jinnan, director of the Gansu Provincial Meteorological Bureau.

The system, which includes four sub-systems for monitoring, communication, alarm services and technical assurance, will be built in Gansu, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Shaanxi and

Beijing, which are either the origins of China's sandstorms or passageways for them.

As a leading team of the system construction, the Ganxu bureau has started to upgrade its meteorological station, install additional radars, build broadband transmission facilities and set up all necessary devices to monitor land moisture and water tables. It will soon open a website with updates of the causes and development of sandstorms and ways to protect against them.

Sandstorm weather featuring strong wind carrying clouds of sand or dust reducing visibility drastically has turned more than half of spring days (from March to May) into grey or even dark in the north.

A lack of vegetation in northern China, dry and sandy land, and strong winds were blamed for the bad weather, experts with the China Meteorological Administration said.

And North China has been experiencing an ever-extending drought since 1999 or the worst in 50 years.

Human activities in recent years have also helped trigger sandstorms or sand movements in the north, including widespread desertification caused by overgrazing and farming, increased population and livestock, rapid urbanization, misuse of water resources and a growing number of construction projects.

(China Daily March 11, 2002)