Tehran Air Quality Monitoring Network & Pollution Emergency Closures
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
1 sourced claim on this page, none individually verified yet — turn on “Sources in the text” to see each one.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
Tehran's 37 stations log some of the world's worst city air, hour by hour. When readings spike, schools close — but the levers behind the smog sit with the national government, not the city.
what does this mean?
The strongest source behind this entry is an independent peer-reviewed or academic study. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 1 more in Tehran · 🌫️ Air quality guide · 🌱 Environment projects
Tehran measures its air with a real ground network, not a satellite model: 37 monitoring stations — 24 run by Tehran Municipality's Air Quality Control Company (AQCC) and 13 by Iran's Department of Environment — publish hourly PM2.5, PM10, NO2, SO2, CO and O3 readings. A peer-reviewed 2024 analysis of the 2019–2022 station data put the 2022 annual PM2.5 average at 36.11 µg/m³, more than double the WHO guideline. The readings have consequences, but only through people: when smog spiked in November–December 2025, authorities closed schools and universities in the capital and banned trucks — decisions taken in emergency sessions, with no automatic trigger. The levers behind the smog — winter mazut burning at power plants, subsidised fuel, an ageing vehicle fleet — sit with the national government, and official statistics attribute tens of thousands of deaths a year across Iran to unsafe air.
📊 Impact
A peer-reviewed 2024 analysis of hourly data from all 37 stations (2019–2022) measured a 2022 annual PM2.5 average of 36.11 µg/m³ — more than double the WHO guideline of 15 µg/m³ (Scientific Reports).
🎓 Lesson
Owning the measurement is not owning the levers: the city's network documents the smog with peer-reviewed rigour, but mazut, fuel subsidies and the vehicle fleet are national policy — so readings trigger school closures, not source control.
Sources
📅 How old is the evidence?
Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. 3 of 4 sources carry a publication date, from 24 October 2024 to 1 December 2025.
When the sources were published
- Springer Nature · researchScientific Reports (Nature) — 'Spatial and temporal patterns of urban air pollution in Tehran' (2024)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) · pressRFE/RL — 'Tehran Pollution Reaches Alarming Level In Latest Environmental Crisis' (29 Nov 2025)
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) · pressRFE/RL — 'Tehran Suffocates As Air Pollution Reaches Crisis Levels' (1 Dec 2025)
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 1 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 1 addressable claim, 4 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 1
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-443d1fd1025e612e
quantitative
a 2022 annual PM2.5 average of 36.11 µg/m³ — more than double the WHO guideline of 15 µg/m³
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:1910d615b68c6058e2a170b91a424dc6b2742f77b2b791e03893274e419ff7b6
- 1
- of 1 claims mapped
- 4
- source dossiers
- 3
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Tehran Air Quality Control Company (Tehran Municipality) with Iran's Department of Environment
- Actor types
- city-government
- Funding model
- Not recorded
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
4 source dossiers
Scientific Reports (Nature) — 'Spatial and temporal patterns of urban air pollution in Tehran' (2024)
- Stable source ID
src-8ae6d70ebfbe7418- Publisher
- Name not classified · nature.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2024-10-24
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-07
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Carries the station count ('In Tehran, 37 AQMSs are operational, with 24 monitored by the Air Quality Control Company (AQCC) and 13 under the supervision of the Department of Environment'), the hourly 2019–2022 dataset and the 36.11 µg/m³ 2022 PM2.5 average vs the 15 µg/m³ WHO guideline. Fetched and quoted.
- Claims linked
aqicn.org — Tehran real-time AQI (World Air Quality Index project)
- Stable source ID
src-7b0ea6b8254a3c08- Publisher
- Name not classified · aqicn.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-07
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Station-before-number check: confirms named ground stations (Imam Khomeini, Poonak, Pasdaran, Region 19, Shahid Beheshti University) feeding live data via Iran's national monitoring system aqms.doe.ir — not a satellite model. Fetched.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
RFE/RL — 'Tehran Suffocates As Air Pollution Reaches Crisis Levels' (1 Dec 2025)
- Stable source ID
src-1e4fdf85df55cd48- Publisher
- Name not classified · rferl.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2025-12-01
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-07
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Carries the November–December 2025 emergency response — schools closed, truck travel banned — and the line that official statistics attribute tens of thousands of deaths across Iran each year to unsafe air. Fetched.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
RFE/RL — 'Tehran Pollution Reaches Alarming Level In Latest Environmental Crisis' (29 Nov 2025)
- Stable source ID
src-4837b7ce933e751a- Publisher
- Name not classified · rferl.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2025-11-29
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-07
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Carries the closure of educational institutions and universities in the capital as air quality deteriorated. Verified via RFE/RL site-search summary; article body itself is a video piece.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
Continue exploring
Compare this project
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Tehran Air Quality Monitoring Network & Pollution Emergency Closures” — Tehran, Iran. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/tehran-air-quality-monitoring/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.