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 24 Feb 2023: North Macedonia 44.2 µg/m³, Slovenia 38.8 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 28.1 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities44.2
- 2Slovenia8 cities38.8
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities28.1
- 4Italy36 cities, was 925.4
- 5Kosovo6 cities25.0
- 6Greece9 cities20.8
- 7Croatia3 cities19.3
- 8Spain90 cities16.4
- 9France129 cities14.3
- 10Belgium35 cities13.8
- 11Romania7 cities13.5
- 12The Netherlands27 cities12.3
- 13Slovakia33 cities12.1
- 14Poland69 cities11.7
- 15Latvia4 cities11.3
- 16Portugal8 cities10.4
- 17Germany171 cities10.2
- 18Czechia36 cities9.8
- 19Austria17 cities9.7
- 20Finland13 cities9.5
+ 4 more countries, 6.6 µg/m³ and below
- 21United States425 cities6.6
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.