🌬️ EPA Air Quality System (AQS) Scraper

🚀 Export U.S. air quality measurements in seconds. Pull PM2.5, PM10, NO2, O3, CO, SO2, lead, and meteorological readings from 10,000+ EPA monitoring stations nationwide. No signup required for demo data.

The EPA AQS Scraper connects directly to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality System (AQS) API and delivers real ambient air-quality data in three collection modes: daily county summaries, hourly site-level samples, and an active monitor inventory. The underlying AQS database is the authoritative federal reference for U.S. ambient air monitoring and has been maintained by the EPA and state/local agencies since the 1970s.

The data covers all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. It spans criteria pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act - PM2.5, PM10, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and lead - plus meteorological parameters and volatile organic compounds from over 10,000 monitoring stations. This Actor makes that data downloadable as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in seconds. No parsing engineering required.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Environmental engineers, public health researchers, climate scientists, city planners, journalists, compliance teams, GIS analysts	AQI dashboards, health impact studies, regulatory compliance reporting, air-quality mapping, trend analysis, research datasets

📋 What the EPA AQS Scraper does

Three dataset modes in a single Actor:

• 📅 Daily Summary by County. Statistical daily summaries (arithmetic mean, first max value, AQI, observation count) for any county, pollutant, and date range up to one year.
• ⏱️ Hourly Samples by Site. Individual sample measurements with local and GMT timestamps for any specific monitoring site.
• 🗺️ Active Monitor Inventory. Directory of all active or historical monitoring stations in a state, including coordinates, agency, monitor type, and operational dates.

Each record includes geographic identifiers (state, county, city, site address, CBSA), measurement metadata (units, sample duration, method, AQI), and precise coordinates (latitude/longitude).

💡 Why it matters: the EPA AQS is the gold standard for U.S. air quality data, but navigating its raw API requires knowing parameter codes, FIPS codes, date formats, and credential setup. This Actor handles all of that so researchers, engineers, and analysts can access the data immediately without writing a single line of code.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: aqi, cbsaCode, cbsaName, cityName, closeDate, countyCode, countyName, date, datetimeGmt, datetimeLocal, datum, eventType, latitude, localSiteName, longitude, measurementScale, method, methodType, monitoringAgency, monitorType, observationCount, openDate, parameterCode, parameterName, poc, pollutantStandard, qualifier, sampleDuration, sampleFrequency, scrapedAt, siteAddress, siteNumber, stateCode, stateName, time, units, value. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: the shared demo credentials work for small test runs but have a low quota. For production work, register a free account on the EPA AQS data service in 30 seconds and pass your own email + accessKey in the input. Per-query date windows are capped at one calendar year.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account - Create a free account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the Actor - Search "EPA AQS" in the Apify Store or use the direct link.
3. Select your dataset - Choose Daily Summary, Hourly Samples, or Monitor Inventory.
4. Set your filters - Pick state, county, pollutant parameter, and date range.
5. Run - Click Start. Results appear in the dataset within seconds.
6. Export - Download as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the dataset page.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection to find scrapers for government databases, financial data, and public records that pair well with environmental datasets.

Need help or found a bug? Open an issue on the Apify Community Forum.

Disclaimer: This Actor retrieves publicly available data from the U.S. EPA Air Quality System API. All data is sourced directly from the EPA and is subject to the EPA's terms of use. ParseForge is not affiliated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Measurement values, especially recent data, may be preliminary and subject to revision by the EPA.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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