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 7 days to 9 Feb 2023: North Macedonia 30.4 µg/m³, Poland 27.9 µg/m³ and Slovenia 25.4 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities30.4
- 2Poland69 cities27.9
- 3Slovenia8 cities25.4
- 4Czechia36 cities21.5
- 5Romania8 cities21.1
- 6Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities20.8
- 7Slovakia33 cities17.4
- 8Belgium34 cities15.4
- 9France129 cities14.6
- 10Germany171 cities13.4
- 11The Netherlands26 cities13.0
- 12Austria16 cities12.6
- 13Greece10 cities11.9
- 14Italy33 cities11.9
- 15Portugal7 cities10.9
- 16Latvia4 cities10.3
- 17Norway17 cities9.8
- 18Spain91 cities9.7
- 19United States418 cities8.1
- 20Lithuania3 cities7.6
+ 3 more countries, 5.5 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Kosovo since 5 Feb 2023, Australia since 4 Feb 2023, Bulgaria since 4 Feb 2023 and 20 more countries. 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.