AQI History Charts

Since 2008 the US Embassy in Beijing has been publishing hourly PM2.5 and AQI levels. In 2013, after protesting it proved not to work and increasingly vocal Chinese popular opinion pushed for it, the Chinese government also started publishing their own statistics. It is a foregone conclusion that Xinhua reporting will show things getting better. This site lets you review the historic figures to check if it is really true. (spoiler alert: for 2015 it certainly is).

For the last couple years at the end of the year I compiled data for the previous years into a subsite, but that is a lot of work, and answering some questions only brings up more. So, this page will let people generate their own charts to get their own answers. Charts you generate can be bookmarked and sent to others.

Any suggestions for other chart types can be considered if you send me mail. The PHP source and the Javascript code are available if anyone is interested, and Google Charts is used for the graphing.

Go to airquality reporting page

Get years months for starting at

display charts:

    Daily Plots the high, average, and low readings for each day in the range
    Summary Shows the range for all readings, plotted by month
    Green air Shows the range of the highest reading of each day
    Lowest high/highest low Shows the monthly highest low and lowest high to tell good and bad days
    Ratings table Ranks months according to various criteria
    Streaks Over Under Finds consecutive readings over or under a threshold