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 7 days to 20 Jan 2024: Pakistan 246.9 µg/m³, India 67.3 µg/m³ and North Macedonia 45.8 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan4 cities246.9
- 2India5 cities67.3
- 3North Macedonia7 cities45.8
- 4China3 cities43.3
- 5Montenegro3 cities40.9
- 6Thailand60 cities, was 1040.2
- 7Serbia12 cities, was 331.0
- 8Peru5 cities28.5
- 9Romania8 cities24.3
- 10Bulgaria6 cities24.1
- 11Greece10 cities24.0
- 12Italy22 cities20.8
- 13Poland78 cities20.3
- 14Hungary9 cities18.5
- 15Chile43 cities18.3
- 16France133 cities17.6
- 17Norway21 cities17.0
- 18Slovakia27 cities16.2
- 19Luxembourg3 cities15.7
- 20Austria28 cities15.5
+ 21 more countries, 15.5 µg/m³ and below
- 36United States751 cities6.6
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Reunion since 15 Jan 2024, Malta since 2 Jan 2024 and Martinique since 1 Dec 2023.
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.