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 7 days to 22 Sep 2024: Santa María 82.0 µg/m³, Peshawar 74.6 µg/m³ and Lahore 74.6 µg/m³.
- 1Santa MaríaPeru82.0
- 2PeshawarPakistan74.6
- 3LahorePakistan74.6
- 4KinshasaDemocratic Republic of the Congo73.5
- 5KampalaUganda65.3
- 6DushanbeTajikistan63.2
- 7DhakaBangladesh55.1
- 8JakartaIndonesia52.7
- 9AntananarivoMadagascar47.0
- 10OsornoChile45.2
- 11Ribeirão PretoBrazil42.4
- 12LajaChile42.4
- 13HualpénChile42.0
- 14IslamabadPakistan41.3
- 15KigaliRwanda38.6
- 16Puerto VarasChile38.5
- 17DelhiIndia37.4
- 18KolkataIndia37.0
- 19La UniónChile36.8
- 20CairoEgypt36.3
+ 2,080 more cities, the next at 36.3 µg/m³
Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Baghdad since 16 Sep 2024, Baku since 7 Sep 2024, Timóteo since 6 Sep 2024 and Manama since 16 Aug 2024.
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.