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 21 Feb 2023: North Macedonia 53.3 µg/m³, Slovenia 38.7 µg/m³ and Kosovo 32.6 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities53.3
- 2Slovenia8 cities38.7
- 3Kosovo6 cities32.6
- 4Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities27.2
- 5Romania7 cities26.1
- 6Greece10 cities25.8
- 7Italy31 cities, was 925.5
- 8Slovakia33 cities20.9
- 9Croatia3 cities20.3
- 10Poland69 cities17.9
- 11France130 cities15.8
- 12Belgium35 cities15.6
- 13Spain91 cities15.2
- 14The Netherlands25 cities15.1
- 15Czechia36 cities14.1
- 16Portugal8 cities11.8
- 17Austria17 cities11.3
- 18Germany171 cities11.2
- 19Norway17 cities9.7
- 20Latvia4 cities9.1
+ 4 more countries, 6.9 µg/m³ and below
- 22United States423 cities6.9
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Lithuania since 18 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.