SmogRank / History / Country race
Countries, worst air first, day by day
Each country's typical measured city over the 30 days to every day since January 2023, worst first. Press Play to watch the order change, or drag the slider to any day.
The worst countries for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 23 Jan 2023: Greece 22.0 µg/m³, Poland 16.3 µg/m³ and Czechia 13.4 µg/m³.
- 1Greece6 cities22.0
- 2Poland51 cities16.3
- 3Czechia5 cities13.4
- 4Spain15 cities8.3
- 5France32 cities8.3
- 6Norway16 cities8.3
- 7The Netherlands16 cities8.0
- 8United States328 cities7.8
- 9Finland7 cities4.6
Days missing from the source archive fall in this window, so fewer countries are counted.
Countries counted each day
A country's number is its typical measured city: the median of its cities' means over the 30 days (a city needs 21 of them measured; 5 of 7 on the 7-day race), shown only with 3 such cities. A country whose monitors go quiet fades out where it stood rather than sliding down, so a gap never reads as cleaner air; "was" beside a city count marks a month after many cities joined or left. Some large countries are thin or missing because their monitors' licences don't allow reuse. How we rank.
Not covered: the government monitoring networks of China and Turkey, which publish only on their own websites; we are building the readers for them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.