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 22 Feb 2023: North Macedonia 51.4 µg/m³, Slovenia 39.2 µg/m³ and Kosovo 29.8 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities51.4
- 2Slovenia8 cities39.2
- 3Kosovo6 cities29.8
- 4Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities26.9
- 5Italy33 cities, was 925.7
- 6Romania7 cities24.0
- 7Greece9 cities23.9
- 8Croatia3 cities19.9
- 9Slovakia33 cities18.9
- 10Spain91 cities16.8
- 11Poland69 cities15.5
- 12France130 cities14.5
- 13The Netherlands26 cities14.5
- 14Belgium35 cities13.9
- 15Czechia36 cities12.8
- 16Portugal8 cities11.9
- 17Germany171 cities10.6
- 18Austria17 cities9.8
- 19Latvia4 cities9.3
- 20Finland13 cities8.9
+ 4 more countries, 7.8 µg/m³ and below
- 22United States425 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.