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 30 days to1 Oct 2024 That day's board

The worst cities for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 1 Oct 2024: Kinshasa 90.9 µg/m³, Santa María 75.1 µg/m³ and Lahore 69.0 µg/m³.

  1. 1KinshasaDemocratic Republic of the Congo90.9
  2. 2Santa MaríaPeru75.1
  3. 3LahorePakistan69.0
  4. 4KampalaUganda68.8
  5. 5DushanbeTajikistan67.6
  6. 6PeshawarPakistan60.1
  7. 7AsunciónParaguay47.5
  8. 8OsornoChile47.2
  9. 9BaghdadIraq46.9
  10. 10DhakaBangladesh46.3
  11. 11LajaChile43.9
  12. 12KigaliRwanda43.3
  13. 13Puerto VarasChile43.2
  14. 14JakartaIndonesia43.1
  15. 15VillarricaChile42.3
  16. 16La UniónChile42.3
  17. 17HualpénChile39.8
  18. 18ValdiviaChile37.2
  19. 19CairoEgypt37.0
  20. 20Ash ShīḩānīyahQatar36.2

+ 2,031 more cities, 36.1 µg/m³ and below

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.