Six cities in North China's Hebei Province rank among the bottom 10 cities with the worst air quality in the first 11 months, China's environmental protection authorities said in a report released on Tuesday on the air quality of key cities in China.
The six Hebei cities include Baoding, Tangshan and provincial capital Shijiazhuang, which ranked alongside Henan Province's Zhengzhou, Shandong Province's Jinan, Shanxi Province's Taiyuan and Shaanxi Province's Xi'an as the country's most polluted cities, according to a Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) statement sent to the Global Times on Tuesday.
The MEP also released detailed reports on November air quality in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, provincial capital cities and municipalities.
Luo Yi, the MEP's head of environmental monitoring, said that 338 cites above prefecture-level had acceptable air quality on 80.5 percent of days from January to November, an increase of 2.6 percentage points over the same period last year.
The average density of PM2.5 particles was 44 micrograms per cubic meter, falling 8.3 percent year-on-year, Luo said.
However, the November statistics showed an increase in PM2.5 and PM10 density in the 338 cities compared with that of last year, with the number of days with good air quality accounting for just 71.6 percent.
Compared with the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region had the least number of days with good air quality, which accounted for 59 percent. But it was still 4.8 percentage points higher than that of last year.
Experts said that due to the influence of bad meteorological conditions, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region and Northeast China were besieged by heavy pollution several times last month. Some northern cities experienced sandy and dusty weather three times, which led to an increase in particles in the air, news site chinanews.com reported.
North China issued several warnings for heavy smog in the middle of November.
