A bird's eye view of the city from 38th floor. Heavy fog engulfed the city this morning due to the high humidity and weak winds, which lowers the visibility in most areas to less than 500 meters, forecasters said.(Photo/Shanghai Daily)
Heavy fog engulfed Shanghai this morning due to the high humidity and weak winds, which lowers the visibility in most areas to less than 500 meters, forecasters said.
The Shanghai Meteorological Bureau issued a yellow alert for the heavy fog at 5:35am this morning to warn of the foggy condition which may affect city's traffic. Just 5 minutes earlier, suburban Jinshan District released a district orange heavy fog alert -- the seond highest in a three-level color system -- which indicates that a less-than-200-meter visibility is expected in this area till noon.
At 6am, suburban Jinshan, Jiading and Songjiang districts had their visibility ranging from only 200 to 300 meters, when downtown areas recorded a visibility of 1,000 meters.
The second highest visibility fell in the Pudong New Area, where the reading was 700 meters. Qingpu, Fengxian districts and Chongming County saw a reading of 400 meters at 6am and the visibility for Minhang, Baoshan districts was 500 meters.
However, the visibility in downtown dropped to below 500 meters an hour later.
By 9am, though no expressways have been closed due to the fog, some of them started a speed control.
The weather bureau expected that the dense fog will last throughout the morning and will see a relief in the afternoon when the rain increases.
The overcast and rainy weather will repeat tomorrow and the rain will weaken to drizzles at the weekend. A south-moving cold front is likely to hit the city next week.
