The city of Beijing will spend 20 million yuan (US$2.41 million) to construct 20 new weather towers.  

The new weather towers will be the most advanced of the kind in the country and will be able to monitor and forecast temperature, rainfall and wind direction and speed around the clock, said Guo Hu, head of Beijing Municipal Meteorological Observatory.

According to Guo, the new facilities will be able to monitor destructive storms such as hailstorms, thunderstorms, downpours and sandstorms and offer up to the minute weather forecasting.

Currently there are only two weather towers in the capital.

Wu Zhenghua, a fellow researcher with the municipal meteorological bureau and also a member of the Beijing Disaster Reduction Society, believed the completion of the new weather facilities would make weather forecasting more accurate. The new equipment will help Beijing residents become informed of sudden storms, such as the July 10th downpour.

A sudden strong rainstorm hit China's capital city last Saturday afternoon and paralyzed the traffic in downtown areas for about three hours. The shower started at 4:00 p.m. and continued for two or three hours. Within an hour, the storm brought more than 42 mm of rainfall downtown and more than 25 mm to the western part of the city.

(Xinhua News Agency July 13, 2004)