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On 4 March, AirNow, the home of the U.S. Air Quality Index, shut down its webpage that reported data from air quality monitors at U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. Eos learned of the removal of these data from Dan Westervelt, a climate change and pollution scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.
Westervelt wrote on Bluesky, “This erases ~17 years of a critical data source at ~80 US diplomatic posts around the world. [Critical] for the health of thousands of foreign services officers, critical for research, and critical for air quality data availability for many countries that were otherwise lacking high quality data.”
Big (bad) news: the US Embassy air monitoring program webpage has been taken down: www.airnow.gov/internationa…This erases ~17 years of a critical data source at ~80 US diplomatic posts around the world. Critically for the health of thousands of foreign services officers, critical for research..
— Dan Westervelt (@dwesty.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T14:52:43.612Z
Some air quality experts report that data from these sensors are still being collected, just no longer reported on AirNow.gov. Recent datasets may have been archived or remain available through other platforms. As of 4 March, data collected by monitoring stations in Canada and Mexico remain available.
AirNow’s international data collection was run by the Department of State in partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). AirNow as a whole is a partnership between several federal and state-level agencies related to environmental and human health, including the EPA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Park Service, NASA, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In recent weeks, programs at each of these agencies related to environmental health, climate change, international outreach, data transparency, and environmental justice have been targeted. In some cases, funding has been frozen, taxpayer-funded data have disappeared, offices have shuttered, and staff have been fired.
AirNow data supported monitoring of air quality, pollution, and public health in countries without the infrastructure to deploy their own high-quality sensors. The removal of international data on air quality will likely also hinder our understanding of global patterns of air pollution, wildfire impacts, and public health risks.
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer
This news article is included in Eos’s collection of Research and Development updates.
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