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 7 days to18 Jan 2024 That day's board

The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 7 days to 18 Jan 2024: Peshawar 322.9 µg/m³, Lahore 302.9 µg/m³ and Delhi 279.0 µg/m³.

  1. 1PeshawarPakistan322.9
  2. 2LahorePakistan302.9
  3. 3DelhiIndia279.0
  4. 4IslamabadPakistan207.6
  5. 5KolkataIndia195.7
  6. 6DhakaBangladesh182.6
  7. 7Ulan BatorMongolia122.3
  8. 8N'DjamenaChad109.9
  9. 9KarachiPakistan101.3
  10. 10Banja LukaBosnia and Herzegovina93.7
  11. 11CairoEgypt92.7
  12. 12Ga-RankuwaSouth Africa89.9
  13. 13HyderabadIndia82.4
  14. 14TetovoNorth Macedonia80.8
  15. 15ChennaiIndia76.2
  16. 16PljevljaMontenegro71.9
  17. 17KavadarciNorth Macedonia71.7
  18. 18NišSerbia71.5
  19. 19DushanbeTajikistan69.4
  20. 20SarajevoBosnia and Herzegovina68.8

+ 2,451 more cities, 63.8 µg/m³ and below

Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Ciudad Benito Juárez since 18 Jan 2024, Tlaquepaque since 17 Jan 2024, Abuja since 15 Jan 2024 and 5 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.