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 to20 Jan 2024 That day's board

The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 20 Jan 2024: Lahore 302.7 µg/m³, Peshawar 285.2 µg/m³ and Delhi 248.7 µg/m³.

  1. 1LahorePakistan302.7
  2. 2PeshawarPakistan285.2
  3. 3DelhiIndia248.7
  4. 4DhakaBangladesh193.5
  5. 5KolkataIndia183.1
  6. 6IslamabadPakistan172.9
  7. 7Ulan BatorMongolia139.9
  8. 8AbujaNigeria111.4
  9. 9KarachiPakistan99.1
  10. 10MumbaiIndia92.1
  11. 11HyderabadIndia91.1
  12. 12SalorUzbekistan85.8
  13. 13Banja LukaBosnia and Herzegovina77.4
  14. 14TetovoNorth Macedonia74.5
  15. 15NišSerbia69.5
  16. 16KathmanduNepal68.7
  17. 17KavadarciNorth Macedonia66.9
  18. 18DushanbeTajikistan66.5
  19. 19VelesNorth Macedonia65.4
  20. 20KampalaUganda64.6

+ 2,281 more cities, 61.3 µg/m³ and below

Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Tlaquepaque since 17 Jan 2024, Lagos since 11 Jan 2024, Victoria de Durango since 10 Jan 2024 and 6 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.