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 11 Mar 2023: North Macedonia 41.0 µg/m³, Slovenia 30.7 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 27.6 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities41.0
- 2Slovenia8 cities30.7
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities27.6
- 4Romania7 cities26.5
- 5Kosovo6 cities21.8
- 6Greece9 cities20.6
- 7Poland70 cities20.6
- 8Slovakia33 cities19.2
- 9France127 cities17.6
- 10Italy35 cities, was 617.2
- 11Czechia36 cities16.5
- 12Croatia3 cities16.3
- 13Belgium35 cities15.2
- 14Austria17 cities15.1
- 15The Netherlands27 cities12.4
- 16Germany172 cities12.3
- 17Spain88 cities11.6
- 18Latvia4 cities9.7
- 19Portugal8 cities9.6
- 20Norway17 cities8.5
+ 5 more countries, 7.6 µg/m³ and below
- 22United States425 cities6.9
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.