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 1 Jul 2024: Chile 46.6 µg/m³, Pakistan 36.4 µg/m³ and Peru 20.6 µg/m³.
- 1Chile42 cities46.6
- 2Pakistan3 cities36.4
- 3Peru15 cities20.6
- 4China4 cities19.5
- 5India4 cities16.6
- 6New Zealand5 cities16.4
- 7Slovakia38 cities13.5
- 8Serbia24 cities12.8
- 9South Korea141 cities12.5
- 10Italy8 cities, was 3812.0
- 11Hungary10 cities11.5
- 12Malta5 cities11.4
- 13Belgium39 cities11.2
- 14Poland72 cities10.6
- 15North Macedonia8 cities10.5
- 16Bosnia and Herzegovina5 cities10.3
- 17Singapore5 cities10.2
- 18Thailand48 cities10.2
- 19Germany189 cities9.8
- 20Greece9 cities9.7
+ 19 more countries, 9.6 µg/m³ and below
- 35United States762 cities5.7
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Estonia since 1 Jul 2024, Slovenia since 30 Jun 2024, Iceland since 29 Jun 2024 and 9 more countries.
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.