Check Out a Current Comparison of Air Quality in 3 Cities Facing Pollution Challenges

Aggregating air quality data already put out there by the good works of various local agencies around the world allows a myriad of powerful uses, from research to public engagement to policy. That’s why we think it’s important to build OpenAQ for the public to use.

One thing aggregating such data in a standardized form enables is the unprecedented ability for anyone to compare air quality data from stations across the globe. To be clear, it is not always productive to focus too heavily on the precise ranking of the ‘most polluted’ places. For one, many places around the world remain unmonitored.

A recent article in the Guardian points out the disparity in air quality monitoring available around the world. Image source: The Guardian — http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/dec/02/where-world-most-polluted-city-air-pollution

Another reason is that air quality can vary significantly across any given city, so you have to be careful about inferring too much from an individual station. And after all, after a certain point, being a few micrograms per cubic meter above or below another city in terms of annual average PM2.5 levels doesn’t really mean much other than both places are pretty polluted. That said, such comparisons do matter in that they can provide perspective and a quantifiable sense of scale of air quality issues to a community.

So, here’s a real-time graph (updated every 10 min from the OpenAQ platform) showing air quality from some stations in Delhi, India, Beijing, China, and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. While Beijing and Delhi often make international headlines about their poor air quality, Ulaanbaatar doesn’t, yet experiences serious air pollution levels that threaten a large proportion of the entire country’s population.

Check out the most up to date version of this graph at: https://openaq.org/aq-viz/

These open data and a lot more from many more places are available on openaq.org. Learn how to access it here.