Air Quality Monitor

What does Air Quality Monitor do?

Air Quality Monitor is an Apify actor that retrieves real-time air quality index (AQI) data for cities worldwide using the World Air Quality Index (WAQI) API. It provides comprehensive pollution measurements including PM2.5, PM10, ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and carbon monoxide (CO) levels. The actor identifies the dominant pollutant for each city and includes timestamps for when measurements were recorded. This tool is essential for health-conscious travelers, environmental researchers, urban planners, and anyone monitoring air quality conditions.

Why use Air Quality Monitor?

Air quality directly impacts human health, with poor air quality linked to respiratory diseases, cardiovascular problems, and reduced life expectancy. While individual city air quality readings are available on various websites, comparing conditions across multiple cities requires visiting each source separately. This actor consolidates readings from any number of cities into a single structured dataset, making cross-city comparison trivial. The data can be used to trigger health advisories, plan outdoor activities, evaluate cities for relocation, or build environmental monitoring dashboards.

How to use Air Quality Monitor

1. Open the actor on the Apify platform.
2. Add city names to the cities list. Use common city names in English.
3. Enter your WAQI API token in the apiToken field. Get a free token at https://aqicn.org/data-platform/token/.
4. Click Start to retrieve current air quality data.
5. Download results from the Dataset tab.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
cities	array	List of city names to query	["new york","london","tokyo","beijing"]
apiToken	string	WAQI API token (required, free)	""

Output

Each city record in the dataset contains:

Field	Description
city	Full city/station name
aqi	Overall Air Quality Index value
pm25	PM2.5 particulate matter level
pm10	PM10 particulate matter level
o3	Ozone level
no2	Nitrogen dioxide level
so2	Sulfur dioxide level
co	Carbon monoxide level
dominantPollutant	The pollutant driving the AQI value
timestamp	Time of the measurement

Cost Estimate

This actor is extremely lightweight, making one API call per city. A typical run for 4 cities costs less than $0.001 on the Apify platform. The actor uses 512 MB of memory by default and completes in seconds. Even monitoring 50+ cities costs under $0.005 per run, making it ideal for frequent scheduled monitoring.

Tips and Best Practices

• You must obtain a free WAQI API token before using this actor. Visit https://aqicn.org/data-platform/token/ to register. The process takes about 2 minutes.
• Use common English city names for best results: "new york", "london", "paris", "tokyo", "delhi", "los angeles", "shanghai", etc.
• AQI values interpretation: 0-50 (Good), 51-100 (Moderate), 101-150 (Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups), 151-200 (Unhealthy), 201-300 (Very Unhealthy), 300+ (Hazardous).
• Schedule hourly or daily runs to build a historical air quality database for trend analysis.
• Combine this data with the Water Quality Data Scraper actor for a comprehensive environmental health profile of specific regions.
• PM2.5 is generally considered the most health-relevant pollutant. Pay special attention to this value.
• Some cities may have multiple monitoring stations. The API returns data from the nearest or most representative station.
• The dominantPollutant field tells you which pollutant is primarily responsible for the AQI reading.