Is Recent Air Quality in Poland More Similar to India or Australia?

A few days ago, we came across an interesting article on extremely high particulate matter (PM) levels in the south of Poland, in and around the Tatra Mountains and Zakopane, specifically. Remarkably, the article stated that PM levels in Zakopane, Poland were comparable to those found in Delhi. As with pretty much any article on air quality that catches our attention, we retweeted it out on Twitter, where we’d first come across it:

A few days later, Maëlle Salmon (@ma_salmon), a statistician at CREAL in Barcelona, Spain, shared a graphic she made inspired by the article. Instead of looking at one particular region of Poland, she accessed data from all over Poland, India, and Australia* (as a ‘clean air’ point of reference) from OpenAQ, which aggregates data from official monitors at several locations around the world. Here’s a map, also courtesy of Maëlle, showing most of the Polish stations she used data from (there are a few reporting stations that aren’t on this map, as they aren’t yet associated with geo coordinates in the OpenAQ system):

The figure she created below shows that recent PM2.5 levels across Poland are quite comparable to India and much, much higher than air quality stations reporting from Australia:

Thanks, Maëlle, for the awesome analysis and visualization!

Want to make something similar? You can retrieve data using the open-source R package ‘Ropenaq’, which can be installed following the instructions here: masalmon/Ropenaq. Once you’ve got data, making graphs is easy using cool R tools such as ggplot2 ggplot2 (see masalmon/Ropenaq). And the package comes with great customer service! You can ask any question and report any issue here: masalmon/Ropenaq

Have you made a thought-provoking air quality graphic? Share it with us at @open_aq on Twitter so we can tell the world about it.

*If you’d like to see the sources of data Maëlle pulled from for each country, go here.