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.
The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 27 Dec 2023: Lahore 276.0 µg/m³, Delhi 196.6 µg/m³ and Dhaka 160.7 µg/m³.
- 1LahorePakistan276.0
- 2DelhiIndia196.6
- 3DhakaBangladesh160.7
- 4KolkataIndia148.8
- 5PeshawarPakistan147.6
- 6N'DjamenaChad142.5
- 7Ulan BatorMongolia119.9
- 8SalorUzbekistan111.4
- 9IslamabadPakistan107.8
- 10KarachiPakistan96.4
- 11DushanbeTajikistan85.9
- 12Banja LukaBosnia and Herzegovina85.8
- 13SarajevoBosnia and Herzegovina79.2
- 14AbujaNigeria78.6
- 15HyderabadIndia78.0
- 16MumbaiIndia74.1
- 17LagosNigeria73.8
- 18CairoEgypt72.1
- 19TetovoNorth Macedonia69.2
- 20KathmanduNepal64.8
+ 2,361 more cities, the next at 56.3 µg/m³
Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Ash Shīḩānīyah since 9 Dec 2023, Tha Bo since 28 Nov 2023, Vientiane since 28 Nov 2023 and 6 more cities.
Cities counted each 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, Turkey and Iran, which publish only on their own websites. We are building the reader for China's network. The networks of Turkey and Iran don't answer requests from outside their countries, so we can't read them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.