China hosts 2022 Winter Olympics behind closed doors

Landsat8 OLI-TIRS acquired on 30 January 2014 at 03:00:31 UTC
Sentinel-2 MSI acquired on 13 January 2019 at 03:10:59 UTC
Sentinel-2 MSI acquired on 02 January 2022 at 03:11:31 UTC
Sentinel-1 CSAR IW acquired on 18 January 2022 from 10:13:58 to 10:14:23 UTC
Author(s): Sentinel Vision team, VisioTerra, France - svp@visioterra.fr
Keyword(s): Mountain range, infrastructure, snow, sport event, China
Fig. 1 - S1 (18.01.2022) - China will host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and neighbouring province.
2D view
Fig. 2 - S2 (13.01.2019) - Lying 90 km from Beijing, this view shows Olympic infrastructures being built, before snow was generated.
2D view
Fig. 3 - S1 (02.01.2022) - Yanqing alpine skiing, bobsled and luge infrastructures were opened on Mt Xiaohaituo in 2018 & 2019.
2D view
About 80% of the snow at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, was manufactured. When South Korea hosted in Pyeongchang four years later, that share rose to 90%. 100% of the snow used in these games is artificial.
Fig. 4 - Landsat-8 (30.01.2014) - The Zhangjiakou zone in Hebei province is 220 km from Beijing was developed as a ski resort from 2008.
2D view
These Olympic games will be using artificial snow because of the rarity of natural snow in this region. Over the past four decades, average winter precipitation was only 7.9 millimeters in the arid Beijing-Zhangjiakou region which does not make it ideal for natural or manufactured snow.
Fig. 5 - S2 (13.01.2019) - The competition will be held behind closed doors with the foreign delegations being isolated from the Chinese population.
2D view
The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Space Agency or the European Union.
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2024, processed by VisioTerra.
More on European Commission space:
More on ESA: S-1 website S-2 website S-3 website
More on Copernicus program: Scihub portal Cophub portal Inthub portal Colhub portal
More on VisioTerra: Sentinel Vision Portal Envisat+ERS portal Swarm+GOCE portal CryoSat portal