ActSmall · Air

About ActSmall · Air

A public-good air-quality portal: live ground-station readings against WHO 2021 thresholds, with one concrete tonight-doable mitigation per place. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to air.

Mission

ActSmall · Air exists to make it easier for anyone — a parent, a teacher, a community group, a curious neighbour — to see what is actually in the air near them, and to find a low-cost, citizen-scale thing to do about it. We combine free public PM2.5, NO₂, and O₃ readings from open ground-based monitoring networks with a curated catalog of mitigation techniques whose primary references are openly available.

Data sources for air

The map joins these open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~09:41 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda.

  • Ground-station readings — OpenAQ: an open archive of more than 100 governmental and research air-quality networks. We pull the latest PM2.5, NO₂, and O₃ values once a day (CC BY 4.0).
  • Health-relevant thresholds — the 2021 WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines, which lowered the recommended annual PM2.5 exposure to 5 µg/m³ and the 24-hour to 15 µg/m³.
  • Country averages — population-weighted PM2.5 from Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0), used to shade countries when no station is right next to a tap.
  • Wildfire smoke cross-link — NASA FIRMS active fire detections (MODIS + VIIRS), shared with our fire topic.
  • Country borders — Natural Earth (public domain).
  • Basemap — OpenFreeMap & OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
  • Mitigation catalog — assembled by hand from open-access materials: Clean Air Crew, the US EPA indoor-air-quality program, the WHO Air Pollution programme, and peer-reviewed evaluations of the Corsi-Rosenthal box. Each entry links to its primary reference.

How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.

National figures hide local realities

The recommender is a discovery tool, not a prescription. National averages hide neighbourhood-scale disparities. Where a country publishes a sub-national air-quality dashboard, drill down there — the EU’s EEA Air Index, the UK’s Defra UK-AIR, India’s CPCB, Australia’s DCCEEW, the US’s AirNow, and equivalent national portals. For places without one, ask local authorities.

If something is wrong

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.

Where to read more