Air Quality Indices now available
European and United States AQI via API
The Open-Meteo Air Quality API now offers the European and United States Air Quality index AQI.
Both indices evaluate particulate matter and atmospheric gases. Based on thresholds, air quality is categorised form good to extremely poor conditions.
Each pollutant is evaluated individually. E.g. One index for PM10, ozone or sulphur dioxide. Whichever pollutant is the worst, is returned as one consolidated AQI.
Individual indices per pollutant are given to better understand which pollutant is dominant. Many cites exceed particulate matter thresholds, but bad air can also be caused by high level of ground level ozone.
The different indices can be selected easily in the configurator the the Air Quality API as illustrated below:
For the United States Air Quality Index different thresholds, units and pollutants are used. All thresholds are well documented and open-source to ensure the highest credibility.
As usual, all data is available as an hourly time-series and can be quickly visualised as a graph. The example below shows all 5 pollutants for the European AQI:
All raw pollutant data like PM10 or ozone is of course available as well.
Some users of Open-Meteo already started calculating AQI themself, but small details like the converting from micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m³) to parts-per-billion (ppb) or calculating the mean from past 8 hours make it more difficult. Calculating AQI directly in the API makes easier for everyone.
As a first step only the European and U.S. AQI are implemented, but contributions are welcome for other indices as well! This pull-request on GitHub is a good start to get an understanding of how to implement additional indices.
More new datasets are coming soon. Right now I am finishing the global flood API and working on a new weather archive release based on the 5-km CERRA reanalysis. Make sure to subscribe the Open-Meteo newsletter!
Checking this out for the first time. My area of interest is air quality and I'm seeing some nice possibilities here if I can figure out how to use your site/technology. I'll need time! Also, more than willing to pledge the annual donation if I actually start using this. I found out about your site today on Twitter when you left a comment about the ERA5 extension back to 1940.