India Air Quality Database

Hourly pollutant readings from every station in India's CPCB continuous monitoring network (553 stations, 2009 onwards) and the five US Embassy and Consulate monitors, published by XKDR Forum as an API and as bulk Parquet files.

https://airquality.xkdr.org

Quickstart notebook

india_air_quality_quickstart.ipynb walks through the data with the public demo key: what is published, where the stations are, pulling one year into the runtime, plots of Delhi's November smog, five cities through the year, the daily cycle, and maps of annual and November PM2.5 by station. Runs top to bottom in Google Colab in about a minute.

What's in this repository

Path	What
india_air_quality_quickstart.ipynb	The Colab notebook above
gateway/	Cloudflare Worker: the website, API keys (D1), the admin key generator, rate limits, bulk files from R2, proxy to the query service
api/	Query service: FastAPI + DuckDB over the Parquet files, behind the gateway
exporter/	Postgres/TimescaleDB to Hive-partitioned Parquet, uploaded to R2
stations/	Station location files used to fill coordinates
docs/PUBLIC_API.md	User documentation
docs/DEPLOY_API.md	How the pieces are deployed and operated
docker-compose.yml	Server-side stack: R2 mirror, query service, Cloudflare Tunnel

The data itself lives on Cloudflare R2 (about 410 MB of Parquet, 196 million rows) and is served through the API; it is not in this repository.

Getting a key

The demo key on the website reads the 2024 files and is capped at 10,000 rows per API query. For the whole archive with no limits, email admin@xkdr.org with your name, your organisation, and how you plan to use the data. See https://airquality.xkdr.org/signup.

Using the API

# Daily PM2.5 for every monitor in Delhi, November 2024, as CSV
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer aqi_demo_wbf92Qx21zX-Wa_Tg8Dx1nXe" \
  "https://airquality.xkdr.org/v1/measurements?city=Delhi&parameter=PM2.5&start=2024-11-01&end=2024-11-30&agg=daily&format=csv"

Endpoint	What you get
GET /v1/meta	Export time, months covered, row counts, schema
GET /v1/stations	Stations with coordinates; filters source, state, city, q
GET /v1/parameters	Pollutants and units
GET /v1/measurements	The time series; filter by station, parameter, city, state, source, start, end; agg = raw, hourly, daily, monthly; format = json, csv, parquet
GET /v1/files	The bulk Parquet files, one per month

Full reference: https://airquality.xkdr.org/#docs

Data notes

• Timestamps are Indian Standard Time. CPCB readings sit on the hour, embassy readings at half past.
• Values are as reported by the networks: no gap filling, outlier removal or calibration.
• station_id is CPCB's site number (site_103) or the embassy id (DS1010001).
• Each month file is sorted by station, pollutant and time, so Parquet readers skip most of a file when filtering on a station.

Licence, attribution and warranty

The data compilation is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: use it for anything, including commercial work, and credit India Air Quality Database, XKDR Forum together with the sources, the Central Pollution Control Board (CAAQM network) and the US Department of State via AirNow.

The data is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. It is published as received from the monitoring networks, which label readings preliminary and not fully validated, and it has not been validated by XKDR for regulatory, legal or health decisions.