Samasafia Air Quality Monitoring Network
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
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.
Samasafia — 'clear sky' — gave Algiers four fixed monitoring stations in 2002, measuring nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, fine particles and ozone. It was run by the national environment observatory ONEDD, cost around one million dollars financed by a World Bank loan, and published a daily air quality index in newspapers and on public display panels. The last measurements date from August 2009 and the last annual report from 2008. By 2012 the screens were black. In July 2024 the environment ministry was still preparing a replacement.
🎓 Lesson
Check that the station exists before you trust the number. Consumer air quality apps show an index for Algiers every day, but the city has had no operating reference network since 2009 — those figures come from models, not from instruments on the ground. Note also the pattern: this was the second Algiers network to be dismantled, after an earlier one was taken out in the early 1990s. Building the stations was never the hard part; funding somebody to keep them calibrated was.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Samasafia Air Quality Monitoring Network” — Algiers, Algeria. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/algiers-samasafia-air-monitoring/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.