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 11 Mar 2023: North Macedonia 26.1 µg/m³, Slovenia 22.4 µg/m³ and Bosnia and Herzegovina 19.5 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities26.1
- 2Slovenia8 cities22.4
- 3Bosnia and Herzegovina4 cities19.5
- 4Romania8 cities19.2
- 5Poland70 cities15.1
- 6Kosovo6 cities13.5
- 7Slovakia33 cities12.8
- 8Greece10 cities11.8
- 9France128 cities11.3
- 10Austria17 cities11.2
- 11Italy35 cities, was 911.2
- 12Belgium35 cities9.9
- 13Croatia3 cities9.6
- 14Latvia4 cities9.5
- 15Czechia36 cities8.8
- 16Germany173 cities8.1
- 17Spain88 cities7.3
- 18Norway17 cities7.3
- 19The Netherlands26 cities6.2
- 20Portugal8 cities6.0
+ 3 more countries, 5.7 µg/m³ and below
- 21United States418 cities5.7
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Reunion since 6 Mar 2023, Lithuania since 4 Mar 2023, Australia since 4 Feb 2023 and 21 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.