About this tool
This page shows the latest reading from the one monitoring location that the azwebdata service holds under the city name "Kampot" — a single point anchored at about 10.61°N, 104.18°E in the riverside town, a few kilometres inland from the Gulf of Thailand and below the Bokor foothills. As with every city page here, it is a station reading, not a town-wide or province-wide average: Kep, the Bokor plateau and the rural districts all lie beyond the point that produces the number. Kampot's coastal position gives its air a structural advantage: sea-breeze ventilation disperses pollution faster than the inland cities enjoy, and its local burning load is far below the rice belt — a 2022 provincial inventory estimated Kampot's rice-straw PM2.5 at roughly a third of Battambang's. That is a mechanism, not a guarantee: during the dry season, regional burning smoke travels long distances, and a coastal breeze can only dilute so much. The card is the honest way to find out what today actually is, rather than assuming the town is always the cleanest of the five this site covers.
How it works
When you open the page, your browser asks the InKhmer API for the province id kampot. The service looks up its Cambodia station table, finds the entry with that cityId — latitude 10.6111, longitude 104.1835 — and requests the latest air-quality snapshot azwebdata stores under the location name "Kampot". 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. The point sits in the town, close enough to the coast that the sea breeze is part of what the reading captures: on a windy afternoon the card can drop even while inland smoke persists, and on a still day the town's own traffic and cooking fires set the level. The card is a snapshot of one location at one moment — it will not tell you what the air is like up on Bokor, and it is not a forecast. If the provider stops answering, the last good cached value is served; with nothing available, the page shows "No air quality data at the moment".
Use cases
- A riverside guesthouse host advising guests whether the morning kayak trip is a clear-air outing or a hazy one.
- A family planning a day trip up to Bokor checking the card and treating it as the town baseline, not the plateau’s air.
- An expat deciding on a hazy evening whether to run the air conditioning on recirculate or leave the riverside windows open.
- A pepper-farm or durian-orchard worker in the surrounding countryside using the town reading as a rough signal for field work.
- A weekend visitor comparing the five city cards on the Cambodia overview before choosing between a Kampot stay and an inland one.
- A runner along the riverfront picking a day and hour when the band stays in the lower half of the scale.
Frequently asked questions
Is Kampot’s air always better than Phnom Penh’s?
Not automatically, and the card is the way to check rather than assume. Kampot’s coastal position brings sea-breeze ventilation and a much smaller local burning load — a 2022 provincial inventory estimated its rice-straw PM2.5 at roughly a third of Battambang’s — which is why its readings often run low. But dry-season smoke travels hundreds of kilometres, and on a still day the town’s own traffic and cooking fires still produce particulates. On many days the card will indeed be the lowest of the five; on others it will not be.
Does this reading cover Kep or Bokor?
No. The number comes from the single monitoring location azwebdata holds under "Kampot", anchored in the riverside town at about 10.61°N, 104.18°E. Kep is a separate coastal town with no station in this site’s set — the nearest covered reading is this one. Bokor is a mountain plateau where altitude, forest cover and cloud mean different conditions entirely. Use the card for the town; for the plateau, read it as a rough indication and add the weather.
Is this the official government reading for Kampot?
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 haze still reach the coast in the dry season?
Because burning-season smoke does not respect provincial lines. Agricultural residue burning across the rice belt and the wider region releases fine particles that travel with the wind — a 2022 provincial inventory estimates thousands of tonnes of PM2.5 from rice-straw burning across Cambodia each year, most of it in the inland belt. When the wind is from the north or northeast, that smoke reaches Kampot; the sea breeze clears it faster than inland, but cannot always keep up. The result is a town that is often clean and occasionally hazy, which is exactly what the card shows.
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 Kampot?
PM2.5 — fine particles small enough to reach deep into the lungs — in almost every reading. 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.
Does the sea breeze clear the air every afternoon?
Not every day — and the card is the way to check whether it did. Coastal breezes in this part of the Gulf are real but variable: on many days the afternoon wind pushes the reading down, which is one reason Kampot often runs lower than the inland cities. But when the regional haze is thick, or the wind is light or blowing off the land, the sea breeze dilutes rather than clears. The card shows the outcome, not the mechanism — if it stayed high all afternoon, the breeze did not win that day.
Data and accuracy
Readings come through azwebdata, which holds one monitoring location under the city name "Kampot" — anchored at 10.6111°N, 104.1835°E in the riverside town — and answers it from OpenAQ, with OpenWeatherMap as fallback, on a thirty-minute schedule with a fifteen-minute on-demand cache. The card shows that one location's most recent stored value at its observation time: a coastal-town reading, not a Kep or Bokor reading, not a province-wide average, and not a forecast. AQI follows the US EPA bands in the scale section. The statements about Kampot's burning load and ventilation are drawn from the cited sources (the provincial emission inventory and the geography of the site), not measured by this site.
Sources
- OpenAQ — open air-quality data platform — OpenAQ
- OpenWeatherMap — Air Pollution API — OpenWeatherMap
- Air Quality Index (AQI) Basics — the US EPA bands — US EPA — AirNow
- Health Impact Assessment from Rice Straw Production in Cambodia (Applied Sciences 12(20):10276) — MDPI — Applied Sciences
Content last reviewed 19 October 2026