Please help me compare cities' air pollution.

Post date: 2021-04-14 11:08:22

I like to be outside, and I like to be in walkable places, and I'd like to know which places have better air quality.

We lived in Chicago for 8 years, downtown, and I coughed all the time. It is likely this was from air pollution and walking near cars every day. Now that we're in St. Louis, when I walk in my neighborhood, it's not full of cars and doesn't seem as polluted, and I don't cough as much.

I'm trying to figure out with data why that is. I've googled air pollution and air quality and I know about iqair.com and epa.gov's air quality. They give me plots of the air quality on specific days, not raw data that I could play with or summary metrics that tell me what I want to know. Plus the data often says "good" and that wasn't true for me, or "8 bad air days since 2012" and that's not super helpful, either.

I want the overall air quality, and I want to be able to compare cities. I'd like to compare other cities, too, not just Chicago and St. Louis.

Is there a ranking like this? Overall air pollutant count? One that weights heavily on car exhaust, maybe? My context is US cities because I'm more likely to live in one of them than in another country, and this is a consideration.

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