OpenAQ Air Pollution Data Scraper

What it does

Scrapes air quality monitoring station data from the OpenAQ API. Access real-time and historical air pollution measurements from thousands of monitoring stations worldwide, including PM2.5, PM10, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide readings. Search by city name to find nearby monitoring stations with their latest readings, geographic coordinates, and measurement parameters.

This Apify actor automates the collection of data from a public API or website, extracting structured information and saving it directly into an Apify dataset. It handles pagination automatically where applicable, supports configurable result limits, and includes robust error handling with timeouts on all HTTP requests. The actor is designed for reliability: it validates inputs, applies sensible defaults, and produces a fallback record when no results are found, so your downstream workflows never receive an empty dataset. Built on the Apify SDK with native Node.js 20 fetch for lightweight, fast execution without browser overhead.

Why use it

Manually collecting data from web APIs and websites is tedious and error-prone. This actor eliminates that burden by running in the cloud on the Apify platform, where it can be scheduled, integrated with webhooks, or chained with other actors. Whether you are conducting research, building a knowledge base, monitoring data sources, or feeding data into an analytics pipeline, this actor gives you structured, ready-to-use JSON output with zero browser overhead. It uses lightweight HTTP requests instead of a full browser, which makes it fast and cost-effective. Every request includes a 120-second timeout to prevent hanging, and all string fields are null-checked for data consistency.

Input parameters

• searchQuery (string, required): City name to search for air quality monitoring stations. Default: "London".
• maxResults (integer, optional): Maximum number of results to return. Default: 100. Range: 1-1000.

All inputs are validated at startup with sensible defaults applied when values are missing. The actor will log warnings for any misconfigured options and continue with safe defaults rather than failing outright.

Output data

Each item in the output dataset contains the following fields:

• id: Unique location identifier
• name: Monitoring station name
• city: City where the station is located
• country: Country code
• latitude: Geographic latitude of the station
• longitude: Geographic longitude of the station
• parameters: Comma-separated list of measured parameters
• lastUpdated: Timestamp of the most recent measurement
• firstUpdated: Timestamp of the first measurement

All string fields are null-checked; missing values are stored as null rather than undefined.

Example output

{
    "id": 12345,
    "name": "London Marylebone Road",
    "city": "London",
    "country": "GB",
    "latitude": 51.5225,
    "longitude": -0.1546,
    "parameters": "pm25, pm10, no2, o3",
    "lastUpdated": "2024-01-15T12:00:00+00:00",
    "firstUpdated": "2015-03-01T00:00:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

This actor is priced on a usage basis:

• $0.01 per result returned in the dataset.
• $0.005 per actor start (fixed platform fee).

For example, scraping 500 results would cost approximately $5.005. Apify provides free monthly credits for new users, so you can try the actor at no charge. Actual costs depend on the number of results, API response times, and memory allocation. You can control costs by setting the maxResults parameter to limit the number of results collected per run. For high-volume use cases, consider running the actor on a schedule during off-peak hours to optimize platform resource usage.

More scrapers from brave_paradise

Check out other useful scrapers built by brave_paradise:

• Open-Meteo Historical Weather Scraper
• GeoNames Place Search Scraper
• NASA FIRMS Active Fire Data Scraper

Visit the brave_paradise profile on Apify to see the full catalogue of actors.