Skopje's Air Is Getting Worse Before Heating Season Even Starts: PM10 in Gazi Baba Doubles in a Week

Heating season hasn't even properly started, and Skopje's air is already going bad. Data from the monitoring stations shows a steady rise in harmful particles since October 1 - in several parts of the city, PM10 concentrations are nearly double what they were at the start of the month.

In Gazi Baba, the average daily PM10 value jumped from 18.4 to 37.7 micrograms per cubic metre. In Karpoš, the daily average climbed from around 32 to over 50 micrograms, and in Miladinovci from 11.5 to 31.3. Centar and Lisiče show the same picture.

Rektorat - 130 micrograms in one hour

The highest hourly concentration on October 7 was recorded by the Rektorat station - 130.07 micrograms of PM10 per cubic metre. Peaks elsewhere were 85.1 in Karpoš, 69.3 in Centar, 68.8 in Lisiče and 61 in Gazi Baba. For the finer and more dangerous PM2.5 particles, the highest values were measured in Gazi Baba, 49.2, and Karpoš, 40.2 micrograms per cubic metre.

The IQAir platform mostly showed Skopje in the moderately polluted zone. The highest local indexes were around Železara - 124, followed by Karpoš and Vlae at 97 and 94, and Mičurin at 86. Only some of the points in Gazi Baba and Novo Lisiče showed better values.

Earlier, on one evening, the Lisiče station registered 116.18 micrograms of PM10 at 7 pm - more than double the permitted daily limit of 50. PM2.5 values in Karpoš and Gazi Baba that evening were above the World Health Organization's recommended 24-hour threshold of 15 micrograms. The state register flagged the air in Centar with its worst category, "very bad", while the station in Gjorče Petrov wasn't delivering any data at all.

Temperatures are dropping, and the Skopje valley is already trapping smoke from traffic and the first home heating of the season. Skopje residents know this script by heart - it just isn't winter yet. If the air looks like this in the first week of October, what is the city walking into in November and December?