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 22 Jul 2023: Chile 37.8 µg/m³, Pakistan 35.5 µg/m³ and China 23.6 µg/m³.
- 1Chile46 cities37.8
- 2Pakistan4 cities35.5
- 3China3 cities23.6
- 4Malta4 cities16.1
- 5India5 cities14.6
- 6Greece8 cities13.5
- 7Mexico12 cities13.5
- 8Thailand11 cities13.4
- 9Canada101 cities13.3
- 10Italy14 cities12.0
- 11Slovakia26 cities11.6
- 12Serbia3 cities10.9
- 13United States745 cities10.9
- 14North Macedonia7 cities10.8
- 15Czechia34 cities10.6
- 16Hungary8 cities10.2
- 17Romania6 cities10.1
- 18Bulgaria6 cities9.9
- 19Singapore5 cities9.5
- 20Luxembourg3 cities9.3
+ 13 more countries, 9.0 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Martinique since 11 Jul 2023 and Poland since 29 May 2023. 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.