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 1 Mar 2023: North Macedonia 33.9 µg/m³, Greece 24.3 µg/m³ and Slovenia 23.1 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities33.9
- 2Greece10 cities24.3
- 3Slovenia8 cities23.1
- 4Poland70 cities21.9
- 5Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities20.5
- 6Kosovo6 cities18.7
- 7Romania7 cities18.4
- 8Italy36 cities, was 917.5
- 9Czechia36 cities15.6
- 10Slovakia33 cities14.8
- 11Austria17 cities14.2
- 12Latvia4 cities12.2
- 13France128 cities11.3
- 14Belgium35 cities10.9
- 15Germany173 cities10.6
- 16Lithuania3 cities9.2
- 17The Netherlands27 cities8.6
- 18Spain87 cities7.8
- 19Portugal8 cities7.5
- 20United States425 cities7.4
+ 4 more countries, 7.1 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Croatia since 28 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.