NEWSLINE AT NOON 12:00 Seoul, Beijing to develop new smog forecast model

You can see it and sometimes even smell and taste it... Most of Korea has been blanketed under a thick layer of fine-dust over the past week or so and the sky remains thick with smog. As the environment ministry's daily forecasts on fine-dust levels have come under fire for being inaccurate,... Seoul has decided to team up with Beijing, a city notorious for its own choking pollution. Shin Se-min starts us off. Thick, toxic smog has blanketed large parts of central Korea and the capital Seoul over the last few days. Responding to criticism the country's smog forecast system is not up to standards, Environment Minister Yoon Seong-kyu says Korea will jointly develop a new forecast model with Beijing to better prepare citizens for fine-dust waves that are headed to Korea. The ministry says China has far superior technology than Korea and Japan in terms of atmospheric forecasting. Currently, the environment ministry receives information on observational data as it continuously updates emission quantity data. However once the cooperative model is running, Seoul will be able to use Chinese data directly,... helping to improve the accuracy of its forecasts. No date has been announced yet on when the new system will be up and running. Seoul's environment ministry has been repeatedly criticized for its inaccurate fine-dust forecasts,... after a series of failures to predict the level of fine-dust in the air. The Chinese government claims to be working on intensive fine-dust reduction measures,... pledging to spend tens of billions of dollars to clean up the extremely high levels of air pollution along eastern China and the capital, Beijing. The toxic particles in the smog carried by winds from China can cause respiratory problems, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. Earlier this week, the Korean government issued an ultra-fine-dust warning,... as the capital's atmospheric concentration levels of the most hazardous PM 2-point-5 particles hit 98 micrograms per cubic meter. Shin Se-min, Arirang News.