SmogRank / History / City race

Cities, worst air first, day by day

Each measured city's average over the 30 days to every day since January 2023, worst first. Find your own city to follow it through the race, or keep to one country.

CountriesCities
The 30 days to17 Nov 2023 That day's board

The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 17 Nov 2023: Lahore 215.5 µg/m³, Delhi 198.2 µg/m³ and N'Djamena 121.2 µg/m³.

  1. 1LahorePakistan215.5
  2. 2DelhiIndia198.2
  3. 3N'DjamenaChad121.2
  4. 4PeshawarPakistan120.1
  5. 5KolkataIndia103.7
  6. 6DhakaBangladesh89.6
  7. 7MumbaiIndia74.1
  8. 8HyderabadIndia72.1
  9. 9KarachiPakistan68.7
  10. 10IslamabadPakistan65.3
  11. 11CairoEgypt52.4
  12. 12Ulan BatorMongolia52.4
  13. 13BeijingChina51.4
  14. 14JakartaIndonesia45.4
  15. 15Şabāḩ as SālimKuwait43.2
  16. 16ShenyangChina42.2
  17. 17DushanbeTajikistan39.6
  18. 18SalorUzbekistan39.1
  19. 19AbujaNigeria38.8
  20. 20Ash ShīḩānīyahQatar37.1

+ 2,200 more cities, 35.8 µg/m³ and below

Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Hanoi since 16 Nov 2023, Kathmandu since 15 Nov 2023, Manama since 2 Nov 2023 and 11 more cities.

30 days7 days
GoodModerateSensitive groupsUnhealthyVery unhealthyHazardousWHO 24-hour guideline, 15 µg/m³Fades where it stood: not counted that day

A city's number is its average over the 30 days, shown only when 21 of them were measured (5 of 7 on the 7-day race), the same minimum as the 30- and 7-day boards. A city whose monitors go quiet fades out where it stood rather than sliding down, so a gap never reads as cleaner air. 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.