Historical data
What the air has been through
Direct pollution measurements are scarce and recent in Sub-Saharan Africa. These public indicators reach further back and track episodes continuously, as long as their limits are kept in mind.
1973-2025 · Level C, indirect indicator
50 years of air, seen from the runway
Every day, airports record how far one can see. When the air fills with particles, visibility drops. We use the mean visibility of dry days, without fog or rain, capped at 10 km so that all stations are comparable. 2016-2025 average compared with the first available decade (at least 5 years).
Read with care
- This is an indirect indicator, not a pollution measurement: Saharan dust, humidity or a change of instrument also affect visibility.
- The 1983-1985 dips in the Sahel match the years of severe drought and dust, not urban pollution.
- In Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Kigali, Lusaka, Harare, Antananarivo, Libreville and Entebbe (Kampala), visibility almost always exceeds 10 km: the indicator detects no change there, which does not prove the air stayed clean.
- A lasting decline goes together with urban growth, but is not enough to establish its cause.
Source: NOAA NCEI, Global Summary of the Day; Air d'Afrique calculations, data retrieved on 2 November 2026.
Last 3 months · Level C, model
Dust and smoke episodes
Aerosol optical depth (AOD) measures how much the air dims the sun across the whole atmosphere. The Copernicus CAMS model estimates it by integrating satellite observations. When AOD rises without dust, smoke from fires is often the reason.
Loading data…
Source: Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service via Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0). Modelled estimates, not ground measurements.
2016-2025 · Level A, reference measurements
US embassy history
Retrieval in progressUS embassy monitors measured PM2.5 for about ten years in several African capitals. Their publication page was removed in March 2025, and the public copies we checked do not include the African series. We will add them as soon as we can retrieve them through the OpenAQ archive.