April 30, 2024

A Satellite View of 2022 Olympic Terrain From NASA

Beijing, the host city for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, is situated on the northern edge of the North China Plain, near the meeting of the Xishan and Yanshan ranges. In the modern context, the mountains make Beijing a feasible host for the winter season Olympics by supplying slopes suitable for alpine skiing, snowboarding, luge, bobsledding, and skeleton.
The venues for skating, ice hockey, and curling are indoor events situated in the flat terrain of main Beijing. A 12,000-square meter speed skating oval and a “huge air” arena (for aerial snowboarding and snowboarding events) constructed on top of a previous steel mill are brand-new structures in the Beijing cluster.

January 29, 2022
Alpine snowboarding and the moving events (bobsled, skeleton, and luge) take place on Xiaohaituo Mountain in Yanqing, a Beijing suburb about 75 kilometers (45 miles) northwest of the city center. Since the region just gets approximately 33 centimeters (1.3 inches) of snow most Februarys, organizers are depending on numerous snow devices to produce adequate snow for the skiing events.
The output from those machines was easy to identify in satellite imagery of the area. On January 29, 2021, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured an image (above) of the downhill trails covered with synthetic snow. The water utilized to make the snow gets piped in from the nearby Foyukou and Baihepu reservoirs. The alpine skiing routes, situated amidst mostly brown hillsides, have optimal slopes of 68 degrees, making this one of the steepest snowboarding locations in the world. Tracks from the sliding center show up just to the southeast near the Yanging Olympic Village.
January 29, 2022
The third cluster of venues is focused in Zhangjiakou, a mountainous location even farther to the northwest of Beijing. Though the slopes are not as steep as in Yanqing, the Zhangjiakou location receives more natural snow. Locations there will host most of ski and snowboarding events, consisting of cross-country, nordic integrated, freestyle, and biathlon. A recently built Beijing-Zhangjiakou intercity train will transfer individuals in between all three places in about an hour.
To develop the 3D map shown at the top of the page, a natural-color image caught by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite sensor on February 1, 2021, was overlaid on a digital elevation model from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, utilizing Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, topographic information from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), and MODIS information from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview.

February 1, 2022
Sporting occasions in Beijing are clustered in 3 zones, each with unique geography.
Beijing, the host city for the 2022 Olympic Winter Games, is situated on the northern edge of the North China Plain, near the meeting of the Xishan and Yanshan varieties. (Shan implies “mountain” in Chinese.) Bordering the city on 3 sides, mountains have a long history of shielding Beijing from roving invaders from the steppe regions to the northwest. In the modern-day context, the mountains make Beijing a feasible host for the winter season Olympics by supplying slopes appropriate for alpine snowboarding, snowboarding, luge, skeleton, and bobsledding.
The places for skating, ice hockey, and curling are indoor occasions located in the flat surface of central Beijing. A 12,000-square meter speed skating oval and a “huge air” stadium (for aerial skiing and snowboarding events) built on top of a former steel mill are brand-new buildings in the Beijing cluster.