Open data · New South Wales · 48 monitoring stations

How many days has the air where you live been over the standard?

Australia's fire season runs when the northern hemisphere's is over. This counts, station by station, the days New South Wales measured 24-hour PM2.5 above the national standard since 2019 — including the summer everyone remembers.

This is not a smoke count. A monitor measures total fine particulate and cannot tell bushfire smoke from a dust storm, a hazard-reduction burn, a wood heater or traffic. Inland New South Wales had severe dust storms during the same weeks as the 2019-20 fires. Read every figure here as days over the national standard, which is what was actually measured.

Type at least two letters. 48 monitoring stations.

What the national picture looks like

Across 48 monitoring stations, 1,652 days were recorded above the NEPM national standard, 25 µg/m³ averaged over 24 hours. The highest single 24-hour average in the record is 560 µg/m³, at Wagga Wagga North. Australia's 2019-20 summer is the reference event, and it is visible in a single station's record: Armidale logged 60 days over the standard in 2019 and four by 2021.

The same question, measured three different ways

Embr runs one of these for each of three countries, and they are not interchangeable. Adding or averaging them would be meaningless.

The American layer counts smoke traced overhead by satellite analysts and cannot tell you it reached the ground. These two count what a monitor at ground level actually measured and cannot tell you the particles were smoke. Opposite blind spots, different claims.

Source, licence and limits

Built from NSW Air Quality Monitoring Network, NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Free to reuse with attribution: the index is downloadable under CC BY 4.0.

A station network is not a map. A place without a monitor is absent from this data, not clean. Coverage also thickens over time, so a location with fewer early years is measuring the network's growth as much as the air.

What smoke leaves behind once it is indoors is the part almost nobody covers, and it is the subject of this site. Nobody has yet measured whether any cleaning method removes wildfire residue from mattress foam — that gap is recorded in the intervention gap.