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 11 Oct 2024: Baghdad 92.5 µg/m³, Kampala 88.4 µg/m³ and Kinshasa 83.0 µg/m³.
- 1BaghdadIraq92.5
- 2KampalaUganda88.4
- 3KinshasaDemocratic Republic of the Congo83.0
- 4HanoiVietnam82.5
- 5LahorePakistan80.6
- 6Santa MaríaPeru69.8
- 7PeshawarPakistan64.8
- 8DhakaBangladesh56.9
- 9BeijingChina51.2
- 10DelhiIndia48.8
- 11SheridanUnited States48.1
- 12JakartaIndonesia46.4
- 13AshgabatTurkmenistan45.3
- 14CairoEgypt43.2
- 15DushanbeTajikistan41.6
- 16Tha BoThailand40.4
- 17VientianeLaos40.4
- 18Samut SakhonThailand39.9
- 19Şabāḩ as SālimKuwait39.8
- 20KarachiPakistan38.7
+ 2,023 more cities, 38.7 µg/m³ and below
Not counted on this day, too few days measured: Astana since 5 Oct 2024, Kigali since 29 Sep 2024 and Iloilo since 25 Sep 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 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.