Weekend mercury set to plummet

Both snow and the temperature are expected to fall over the weekend, threatening to keep air and road travel in the disorderly state they have been in during the current cold snap in North China.

The mercury is predicted to drop by up to 14 C in central and northern parts of the country, the China Meteorological Administration said on Thursday.

The National Meteorological Center has issued a blue alert, the lowest level in a four-tier warning system.

Some places may see their coldest December in years. The temperature in Beijing is expected to hit a 10-year low of -15 C on Saturday night. In the past three decades, the lowest December temperature recorded in the capital came in 1985, when thermometers registered -15.2 C.

"The cold snap will ease off in the capital on Monday, although another spell is expected on Dec 27 and 28," Song Jisong, chief forecaster of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, said on Thursday.

Elderly people and infants should avoid spending a lot of time outdoors over the weekend, he said.

Lu Zining, 3, was dressed in five layers of clothes and was eating steamed glutinous rice with his mother to keep warm on his way to kindergarten on Thursday.

"I don't know what else he could put on to stay warm in the extreme cold that's coming," said his mother, Liu Yi.

Cold fronts have been moving across the country this winter, bringing disorder to travel by land, air and sea.

Snow and ice led to the closure of some airports in the Xinjiang Uygur and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions and Shanxi province on Thursday, as well as sections of expressways in Shanxi, the World Civil Aviation Resource Net reported.

According to satellite images from the National Satellite Meteorological Center, the area occupied by sea ice in Liaodong Bay, off the coast of Liaoning province, increased to 4,715 square kilometers on Monday.

Zhang Fanghua, chief forecaster at the National Meteorological Center, said it is normal to see cold air movements in the winter and the cold spell has nothing to do with doomsday prophecies related to the Mayan calendar.

She said the current movements, although frequent, will not cause the kind of severe damage that arose from a series of winter storms in 2008, which claimed more than 100 lives.

Authorities, though, are preparing for blizzards.

The Beijing city government held a conference with energy companies on Wednesday to get ready for a likely peak in energy consumption. Nearly 7 billion cubic meters of natural gas is expected to be burned for central heating this winter, about 800 million cu m more than in the previous heating season.

A 1-degree drop in temperature normally results in an additional 2 million cubic meters of gas being used in central-heating systems.

To conserve natural gas, authorities have asked hotels, shopping malls and office buildings to keep temperatures below 22 C during the hours when they are open.

Authorities in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region and Gansu province issued warnings on Wednesday afternoon about the coming snowstorms and temperature drop.

Contact the writer at wangqian@chinadaily.com.cn