🌬️ WAQI Air Quality Scraper

🚀 Export real-time air-quality data in seconds. Pull AQI, PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, SO2, CO, weather, and geo for any city or bounding box from the World Air Quality Index. Free to start, full coverage with a free WAQI token.

The WAQI Air Quality Scraper exports real-time air-quality readings from the World Air Quality Index (waqi.info, aqicn.org), the largest open AQI network on the planet. Each record returns 20 fields, including the AQI value, the dominant pollutant, individual measurements for PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, SO2, and CO, weather observations (temperature, pressure, humidity, wind), the station latitude/longitude, the observation timestamp, the official station URL, and the data attributions for proper citation.

The network covers 12,000+ monitoring stations across cities, suburbs, embassies, ports, and rural sites in nearly every country. Three run modes are supported: query a list of named cities, locate the nearest station to the caller, or sweep every station inside a custom lat/lng bounding box.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Climate research, ESG analysts, public-health teams, real-estate due diligence, smart-city ops, news media, environmental NGOs	AQI dashboards, ESG reporting, pollution-exposure studies, location risk assessment, real-time air-quality alerts, environmental journalism

📋 What the WAQI Air Quality Scraper does

Three run modes plus seven-pollutant breakdown:

• 🌆 City mode. Hand a list of city slugs (beijing, shanghai, delhi, london) and get the official station for each.
• 📍 Here mode. Auto-detects the nearest station to the caller IP (good for "what is the AQI right now where I am").
• 📦 Bounds mode. Sweep every station inside a {lat1, lng1, lat2, lng2} bounding box (requires your own token).
• 🏭 Seven pollutants. AQI plus individual PM2.5, PM10, O3, NO2, SO2, CO readings.
• 🌡️ Weather context. Temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind on the same row.
• 🗺️ Geo + attribution. Latitude, longitude, station URL, and the official data-source attributions.

Each record includes the city name, the station ID, the AQI, the dominant pollutant, the seven pollutant readings, the four weather readings, the station coordinates, the observation timestamp, the official station detail URL, the data attributions list, and the scrape time.

💡 Why it matters: WAQI is the most-cited open AQI source for ESG disclosures, real-estate due diligence, and public-health journalism. Building your own pipeline against the data service means writing a station resolver, rate-limit handler, and citation tracker. This Actor returns the row, the weather, the geo, and the attributions on every call.

🔑 Token note: the Actor ships with the public demo token so anyone can try it. The demo token only returns the Shanghai sample station regardless of the city you ask for. For full 12,000+ station coverage and bounding-box queries, grab a free WAQI token at https://aqicn.org/data-platform/token/ and pass it in the token input. Free WAQI tokens have generous limits for individual and research use.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: aqi, attributions, cityName, co, dominantPollutant, humidity, latitude, longitude, no2, o3, observedAt, pm10, pm25, pressure, scrapedAt, so2, stationId, stationUrl, temperature, wind. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🔑 Optional: get a free WAQI token at https://aqicn.org/data-platform/token/ for full station coverage.
3. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the WAQI Air Quality Scraper page on the Apify Store.
4. 🎯 Set input. Pick a mode (city, here, bounds), supply the cities or bounds, paste your token, set maxItems.
5. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
6. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

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• ☁️ NOAA Weather Scraper - US National Weather Service forecasts
• 🌡️ Open-Meteo Weather Scraper - Global weather and climate data
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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more environmental and infrastructure scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the World Air Quality Index Project (WAQI / aqicn.org) or any of its contributors. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available air-quality data is collected.

🆘 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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