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 9 Mar 2023: North Macedonia 44.9 µg/m³, Slovenia 32.6 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 28.7 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities44.9
- 2Slovenia8 cities32.6
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities28.7
- 4Romania7 cities28.0
- 5Poland70 cities22.7
- 6Slovakia33 cities21.5
- 7Greece9 cities20.5
- 8Kosovo5 cities20.2
- 9France129 cities19.1
- 10Czechia36 cities18.0
- 11Italy36 cities, was 617.3
- 12Croatia3 cities17.1
- 13Belgium35 cities16.3
- 14Austria17 cities16.2
- 15Germany172 cities13.4
- 16The Netherlands27 cities13.4
- 17Spain88 cities11.7
- 18Latvia4 cities9.8
- 19Portugal8 cities9.1
- 20Norway17 cities8.5
+ 5 more countries, 7.8 µg/m³ and below
- 22United States426 cities7.3
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.