European city air quality viewer
11:38
The European Environment Agency has launched a new online tool showing the state of air in over 300 cities in Europe over a 2-year period. The ranking includes 43 Polish cities; air quality is not classified as “good” in any of them. The cleanest Suwalki and Slupsk are in the “moderate” group.
The tool, called City Air Quality Viewer, also tracks actual air quality and its forecast for the next 24 hours.
The cleanest cities in Europe are Umea in Sweden, Tampere in Finland, and Funchal in Portugal. The three most polluted cities across the continent are: Nowy Sącz in Poland, Cremona in Italy, and Slavonski Brod in Croatia.
Of the 321 cities, 124 have air quality classified as “good” and are marked in green - meaning that PM 2.5 concentrations did not exceed 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air. There is no Polish city among them.
In cities marked with an orange color the concentration of dangerous to health dust is at a “moderate” level - that is 10-15 micrograms per cubic meter. Among them, there are several Polish cities from northern and eastern Poland, of which Suwałki and Słupsk are rated the best (in the entire ranking they take 176th and 177th place respectively). This group - Polish cities with relatively clean air - also includes Białystok, Bydgoszcz, Elbląg, Gdańsk, Gorzów Wielkopolski, Koszalin, Olsztyn, Szczecin and Zielona Góra.
As many as 27 Polish cities “glow red”. This means that over the past two years the concentration of fine particulate matter and PM 2.5 oscillated between 15 and 25 micrograms per cubic meter of air. Among them are: Toruń, Wrocław, Warsaw, Poznań, Łódź, Siedlce and Kraków.
Two Polish cities were marked in brown (highest concentrations of dust): Zgierz and Nowy Sącz, which closes the whole list. In these cities, concentrations of fine particulate matter and PM 2.5 oscillated between 25 and 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
