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 23 Feb 2023: North Macedonia 48.4 µg/m³, Slovenia 39.4 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 26.9 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities48.4
- 2Slovenia8 cities39.4
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities26.9
- 4Kosovo6 cities26.3
- 5Italy34 cities, was 925.8
- 6Greece9 cities21.9
- 7Croatia3 cities21.0
- 8Romania7 cities18.5
- 9Spain91 cities17.2
- 10Slovakia33 cities14.6
- 11France129 cities13.6
- 12Belgium35 cities13.2
- 13Poland69 cities13.1
- 14The Netherlands26 cities12.9
- 15Czechia36 cities11.2
- 16Portugal8 cities11.1
- 17Latvia4 cities10.4
- 18Germany171 cities10.2
- 19Finland13 cities9.8
- 20Austria17 cities8.9
+ 4 more countries, 6.8 µg/m³ and below
- 21United States427 cities6.8
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.