North China province closes highways as heavy snow forecast

TAIYUAN, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- North China's Shanxi Province on Tuesday closed all its highways as a blizzard was forecast to sweep through a large swathe of the province.

The Taiyuan bus station in the provincial capital of Taiyuan has also suspended all coach trips.

The Shanxi provincial meteorological center upgraded a blue alert for snowstorms to an orange alert on Tuesday afternoon. China has a four-tier color-coded weather warning system, with red representing the most severe, followed by orange, yellow and blue.

The center issued the orange alert at 2:47 p.m. for four prefecture-level cities and parts of two other cities where the precipitation was forecast to exceed 10 mm in the next six hours.

At least eight prefecture-level cities in Shanxi were expected to see over 5 mm of precipitation in the next 24 hours starting Tuesday noon, the center said, issuing a blue alert for heavy snowfall at noon on Tuesday.

The cold front, along with snowy and windy weather, is forecast to bring the maximum temperatures in most parts of Shanxi to below zero degrees Celsius in the coming three days.