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 30 days to 1 Mar 2023: North Macedonia 44.2 µg/m³, Slovenia 32.5 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 27.2 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities44.2
- 2Slovenia8 cities32.5
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities27.2
- 4Romania7 cities25.0
- 5Poland69 cities21.2
- 6Slovakia33 cities19.5
- 7Greece9 cities19.4
- 8Czechia36 cities17.7
- 9Italy34 cities17.7
- 10Belgium34 cities16.5
- 11France129 cities16.5
- 12Austria17 cities14.1
- 13The Netherlands26 cities13.3
- 14Germany172 cities13.1
- 15Spain88 cities12.2
- 16Latvia4 cities10.3
- 17Portugal7 cities9.6
- 18Norway17 cities9.4
- 19Lithuania3 cities8.3
- 20United States422 cities7.8
+ 3 more countries, 5.4 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Bulgaria since 6 Feb 2023, United Kingdom since 6 Feb 2023, Brazil since 5 Feb 2023 and 12 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.