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 24 Mar 2023: North Macedonia 26.4 µg/m³, Romania 20.6 µg/m³ and Slovenia 20.4 µg/m³.
- 1North Macedonia11 cities26.4
- 2Romania7 cities20.6
- 3Slovenia8 cities20.4
- 4Poland70 cities20.1
- 5Kosovo6 cities16.6
- 6Slovakia32 cities16.0
- 7Greece10 cities15.4
- 8Bosnia and Herzegovina3 cities15.3
- 9Czechia36 cities14.8
- 10Austria17 cities13.0
- 11Italy36 cities, was 612.7
- 12France127 cities11.3
- 13Latvia4 cities10.9
- 14Belgium35 cities9.3
- 15Germany173 cities9.1
- 16Spain86 cities7.8
- 17The Netherlands27 cities7.8
- 18Portugal8 cities7.8
- 19Norway17 cities7.5
- 20United States425 cities6.9
+ 2 more countries, 4.6 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Croatia since 24 Mar 2023, Reunion since 19 Mar 2023, Lithuania since 15 Mar 2023 and 15 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.