Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection launched a regional air-quality monitoring programme recently, which will gather necessary information for guaranteeing air quality during the 2008 Olympics.

Being the biggest of its kind ever in the world, the programme covers Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Shanxi, with the help of unmanned aeroplanes to check the air quality of different atmospheric layers.

The programme will collect the data on the transportation of both primary and secondary pollutants, and the emerging of the latter. The data will help to make a 3-D graph on the regional transportation of pollutants, and their transformation. The programme will also include quantizing researches that will discover the relationship between air quality and the quantity of pollutants in the air.

More than 20 institutes and organizations take part in the programme, including Leizipig Institute for Trospospheric Research, and Max-Planck Institute in Germany, Tokyo University in Japan and some other famous institutes and academies.