Air Quality in Battambang

About this tool

The card at the top of this page is the latest reading from the one monitoring location that the azwebdata service holds under the city name "Battambang" — a single point anchored at about 13.10°N, 103.20°E in the provincial town on the Sangkae River. It is a station reading, not an average of the province: the rice belt that surrounds the town is not directly measured, and its burning smoke reaches the station only when the wind carries it. Battambang sits in one of Cambodia's heaviest rice-growing belts, and open burning of rice straw is the seasonal signal here. A 2022 provincial emission inventory put Battambang second among all provinces for PM2.5 from rice-straw production — behind only Prey Veng — and a field study that monitored air quality in Battambang and Prey Veng found PM2.5 levels during burning periods running close to twice the WHO guideline. Between burning seasons, the town's own traffic and the market economy set the baseline. Use the card for the daily calls — school runs, moto commutes, outdoor work in the fields — and remember the number is the town's point of reference, not your village's.

How it works

When you open the page, your browser asks the InKhmer API for the province id battambang. The service looks up its Cambodia station table, finds the entry with that cityId — latitude 13.0957, longitude 103.2022 — and requests the latest air-quality snapshot azwebdata stores under the location name "Battambang". Scheduled Cambodian locations are refreshed every thirty minutes; anything else is fetched on demand and held in a fifteen-minute cache. When OpenAQ has no matching station, OpenWeatherMap's modelled air-pollution values are used instead, mapped onto the same AQI bands. The AQI is derived from the PM2.5 concentration through the US EPA breakpoint table, with PM10 as fallback. Two honest limits follow from this design. First, the point is in town: a field burning twenty kilometres away shows up on the card only as drifting smoke, and the card says nothing about the air beside that field. Second, a provincial town's OpenAQ coverage can be thin, so on some days the number is a model estimate rather than a measured concentration — the page does not hide which, it simply serves the best available value. If the provider stops answering, the last good cached value is served; with nothing at all, the page shows "No air quality data at the moment".

Use cases

• A rice farmer checking the band during harvest before deciding whether a field-burning day adds to an already hazy afternoon.
• A parent on the moto school run along the town’s main roads deciding whether the children wear masks when the card climbs.
• A schoolteacher moving outdoor classes indoors when the reading crosses into the unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups band.
• An NGO field officer driving out to communes on National Road 5 using the town card as a rough baseline for the countryside.
• A family planning an evening walk along the Sangkae riverfront choosing a day when the card is in the lower bands.
• A mill or warehouse manager advising workers with asthma to keep dust masks handy on high-AQI days.

Frequently asked questions

• Does this reading cover the air where I burn my fields?

  No, and this is the most important limit of the page. The number comes from one monitoring location in Battambang town; a field, village or commune kilometres away is not measured by it. Burning smoke can travel far — the provincial inventory shows rice-straw burning releases thousands of tonnes of PM2.5 a year across Battambang — so on hazy days the town card is a useful regional signal, but on a calm day your field can be far worse, or far better, than the card suggests. Treat it as the town reference, not your field’s reading.

• Is this the official government reading for Battambang province?

  No. Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment runs its own monitoring programme and publishes readings through its own channels. This page is independent: it serves OpenAQ monitoring data — with OpenWeatherMap as fallback — collected through the azwebdata service for one location in the town. Use it as a convenient public reading, not a government bulletin; for official announcements, refer to the Ministry of Environment.

• Why does the AQI climb during harvest and burning months?

  Because open burning of rice straw is the dominant seasonal source here. A 2022 provincial emission inventory ranked Battambang second among all Cambodian provinces for PM2.5 released by rice-straw production, and a field study monitoring Battambang and Prey Veng found PM2.5 levels close to twice the WHO guideline during burning periods. Burning is concentrated in and after the harvest, which is also the dry season, when less rain means the smoke lingers instead of being washed out.

• Why does the number sometimes look like a model, not a station?

  Because for provincial towns the OpenAQ coverage can be thin. When no OpenAQ monitoring location matches, azwebdata falls back to OpenWeatherMap’s modelled air-pollution values, which estimate concentrations from emissions and weather rather than measuring them at a sensor. The card does not label which source produced it — it simply shows the best available value. If precision matters for a health decision, treat a model-sourced day as indicative, and combine the card with how the sky looks.

• How fresh is the reading on this page?

  Azwebdata refreshes its scheduled Cambodian snapshots every thirty minutes and serves other locations through a fifteen-minute on-demand cache, so the freshest value is normally under half an hour old. Your browser requests the latest value when the page loads, and the card shows the time the monitor observed the reading. It is a snapshot, not a minute-by-minute feed and not a forecast.

• What does the page show when the station is offline?

  It degrades quietly rather than breaking. If the provider stops answering, azwebdata serves the last good cached value for the location, and the "Updated" line shows when that data was served. If nothing is available at all, the page shows "No air quality data at the moment" instead of an error or a made-up number.

• Which pollutant drives the AQI for Battambang?

  PM2.5 — fine particles small enough to reach deep into the lungs — in almost every reading, and rice-straw burning smoke is exactly the kind of smoke that produces it. The upstream publishes raw concentrations per pollutant, and this service derives the headline AQI from the PM2.5 value using the US EPA breakpoints, falling back to PM10 when no PM2.5 sensor reported. The pollutant table on the card still lists PM2.5, PM10, ozone, NO₂, SO₂ and CO individually.

• The card shows Good, but smoke is visible from my village — why?

  Because the card is one point in the town, and the wind decides what reaches it. A village burning field smoke a few kilometres away can sit under a column of smoke while the town point, upwind of it, reads clean. The provincial inventory shows how much smoke the belt produces each year, but whether that smoke reaches the station at any given hour is a question of wind direction, not of how much is burning. When you can see and smell smoke, trust your eyes over a distant card — and use the card to track whether the haze is spreading toward the town.

Data and accuracy

Content last reviewed 19 October 2026