A dust storm has persisted for the second day in the capital of Tajikistan, making it particularly important for residents to be informed about the environmental conditions in order to prepare for possible adverse weather conditions. However, there is no publicly accessible online platform in Tajikistan for real-time air quality monitoring.
To obtain information about air pollution, citizens often turn to international platforms such as IQAir, AQI.in, Air Quality, AccuWeather, and others. These resources provide real-time air quality data for various cities around the world, including Tajikistan.
However, in early April, the Tajik Hydrometeorology Agency (Hydromet) refuted the data from the international IQAir platform, which indicated that Tajikistan was among the countries with the most polluted air in the world.
For this purpose, the agency even organized a meeting with journalists for the first time.
Hydromet believes that the data from these services may not always be accurate. For instance, IQAir and similar sites often use the annual average concentration of PM2.5, which does not always reflect the full complexity and variability of air pollution in the country.
The official explanation from the agency states that such ratings “should be considered in a balanced manner, with scientific justification and a professional approach.”
According to local experts, annual average pollution indicators may not always account for short-term peak pollution levels, which can be critical, especially during dust storms or other extreme weather conditions.
Air monitoring in Tajikistan
Air quality monitoring in Tajikistan is carried out by the Agency for Hydrometeorology, which uses a monitoring system that includes stationary posts and automatic stations.
However, their data is not published in real-time on publicly accessible platforms.
We visit the Hydromet’s official website. Here is a screenshot we took from the site at 11:30 today.
It is evident that these are not the current indicators for today (this page does not change in principle, we have monitored it for several days).
To obtain accurate air quality data, one needs to request a service which, as it turns out, is simply not available for users.
We click the button – order service. Upon clicking, a form for filling out appears:
Whether this service is paid or free is impossible to determine, as after filling out the form, absolutely nothing happens (we should note here that for the sake of a clean experiment, we tried to do this several times over the past two weeks).
What do we have in the end?
To find out what air they are breathing, citizens of Tajikistan have to rely solely on international platforms – where information can be found online, it is accessible and easy to understand.
For instance, this is what AccuWeather.com (a private American media company providing commercial weather forecasting services) shows about the situation in Dushanbe at 11:50 today.
Until there is a platform in Tajikistan where information about the country’s air quality is provided openly, free of charge, and online, it will be difficult to refute international resources for the inaccuracy of the data provided.
However, today the dirty air in the capital is visible to the naked eye, and, by the way, there is not even a warning about this on the Hydromet website.
