It’s the second day of a dust storm in the capital of Tajikistan. In such conditions, it is especially important for residents to be informed about the state of the environment in order to prepare for possible adverse weather conditions. However, Tajikistan does not have a publicly accessible online platform for real-time air quality monitoring.
For information on air pollution, citizens often turn to international platforms such as IQAir, AQI.in, Air Quality, AccuWeather and others. These resources provide real-time air condition data for various cities around the world, including Tajikistan.
However, in early April, the Tajik Hydromet denied the data of the international IQAir platformsaccording to which the republic is among the countries with the most polluted air in the world.
For this purpose, the department even organized a meeting with journalists for the first time.
Agency for Hydrometeorology Tajikistan believes that the data from these services may not always be accurate. For example, IQAir and similar sites often use annual average PM2.5 concentrations, which does not always reflect the complexity and variability of air pollution in a country.
The official explanation of the Agency for Hydrometeorology of Tajikistan notes that such ratings “should be considered in a balanced manner, with scientific validity and a professional approach.”
According to domestic experts, average annual pollution indicators cannot always take into account short-term peak pollution levels, which can be critical, especially during dust storms or other extreme weather conditions.
Air monitoring in Tajikistan
Air quality control in Tajikistan is carried out by the Agency for Hydrometeorology, which uses a monitoring system that includes fixed posts and automatic stations.
However, their data is not published in real time on public platforms.
Let’s go to official website of Hydromet. Here is a screenshot we took from the site at 11:30am today.
Obviously, these are not current indicators today (this page basically does not change, we monitored it for several days).
To obtain accurate data on the state of the air, you need to use a service that, as it turns out, is simply not available to users.
Click the button – order the service. When clicked, a form to fill out appears:
Whether this service is paid or free, it is impossible to know, since after filling out the form absolutely nothing happens (we note here that for the sake of the purity of the experiment, we tried to do this several times over the last 2 weeks).
What do we end up with?
To find out what kind of air we breathe, citizens of Tajikistan have to use only international platforms – where information can be found online, it is accessible and easy to understand.
This is what it shows, for example: AccuWeather.com resource (a private American media company providing commercial weather forecasting services) about the situation in Dushanbe at 11.50 today.
Until Tajikistan has a platform on which information about air quality in the country will be publicly available, free and online, it will be difficult to refute international resources that the data provided is unreliable.
But today the dirty air in the capital is visible to the naked eye and, by the way, on Hydromet website There is not even a warning about this.
