Beijing Air Quality: pm2.5

Sorry

I moved away from Beijing in 2024, and checking back I see my source stopped providing the data
in early 2025. I'm leaving the page up but there will not be any more data recovered after early 2024.
Thanks for those who have relied on this site for daily forecasts and research. Current data, from 2014,
is available at aqicn.org/historical.

My historical data, going back to about 2008, is still available to view or download by using the site controls.

2008
(partial year)		 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
150 166 166 159 151 162 158 141 132 118 109
After dramatic improvement in 2017 the pace continued in 2018. The top 4 months of 2018 all bettered the previous best of August 2017, with September the new record holder at 72.7. January, September, and October all had 40% green days. The worst month was March, which rated #75 of the 127 months in the database. See the monthly comparison chart

Generate your own charts with the new chart page

Want to contact me? Go to my main site, this has been disabled due to too much spam

Get results for ending: Now At: -- at :00
New! Beijing smog forecast from banshirne.com
Next time with good air: ???
Next morning with clean air: ???
Last updated at 2026-03-10 13:00 UTC

More complete forecast information can be found at aqicn.org


City:
Scale: US China What does this mean?


Data for previous years can be accessed in csv form from the summary pages

No data found from 2026-05-03 11:00 to 2026-05-04 11:00
Wired had an article about how the US Embassy AQI tweets helped speed up China's monitoring and addressing its pollution problem. I'd like to think my page also helped.
The original purpose of this site was to save historical data, which at the time the US Embassy did not supply. A while ago they started making it available too. The site is stateair.net. They have some explicit restrictions and limitations on use of their data.

More information on my site can be found here, or visit my main site. That page also has links where you can get history updates or link to a graphics label that can be put on web pages. And, for ubuntu users, there is an app that shows the current API in the top bar.

PM2.5 measurements are commonly given in 2 different units, ug/m3 and AQI. The difference between them is explained here, and here is a calculator that will let you convert one to the other. AQI only goes up to 500, what do those "crazy bad" readings mean?

Here is a story about a guy who has another, more qualitative way to show the data: every day he takes a picture of the same scene outside his window. His blog (in Chinese) is at http://weibo.com/u/1000481815.

Daily 2014 images

Daily 2015 images

Does not work well with IE, but does with Chrome, Firefox, and Opera - and I don't care about IE.