Monitoring the air citizens breathe across 13 Indonesian cities in the 2026 dry season
This tool provides near-real-time tracking of ambient air quality trends across 13 selected cities in Indonesia. Its primary goal is to help researchers, policymakers, and communities recognize trends during El Niño, and perhaps anticipate the extent of weather anomalies that might worsen ongoing, chronic air pollution issues.
Responsives
15 Jul 2026, by Katherine Hasan, LinkedIn article: “Moderate blue” and “unhealthy yellow”: Is the current air quality index giving Indonesian citizens a false sense of security?
24 Jul 2026, by Katherine Hasan, LinkedIn article: “Predicting Jakarta’s 3-Day AQ is a leap forward — so now what?”
The El Niño Impact
To better understand air pollution dynamics, it is necessary to distinguish long-term emission trends from seasonal weather variations or anomalies. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) plays a profound role in exacerbating air pollution across the Indonesian archipelago. During El Niño phases, shifts in sea surface temperatures delay the onset of the monsoon season, affecting air quality in two ways.
First, suppressed rainfall results in higher concentrations of pollutants in ambient air. In normal weather conditions, rainfall acts as a scrubbing mechanism, washing particulate matter and other air pollutants out of the atmosphere. Extended dry conditions under El Niño impede this process, causing emissions to accumulate and stagnate directly over their sources and the respective airshed.
Second, longer, more intense droughts make peatlands and forests highly flammable, leading to increased fire activity. These intense open burnings release massive columns of smoke and haze into the atmosphere. Prevailing winds carry this haze over long distances, causing transboundary haze to stack on top of baseline levels, potentially resulting in emergency thresholds in areas far from the fire sources.
To mitigate impacts of the 2026 El Niño, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency (Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi, dan Geofisika, BMKG) urges a coordinated, multi-sectoral strategy that proactively addresses vulnerabilities across all sectors — land management, health, agriculture, economy, and energy — shifting from early warning to early action.
In land management, authorities are advised to strictly enforce anti-burning measures, closely monitor fire hotspots, conduct patrols, and irrigate peatlands using canal blocks. To protect public health, BMKG recommends enhancing PM2.5-based air quality early warnings and ensuring local medical facilities are equipped to handle a surge in acute respiratory infections (ISPA). The agriculture and economic sectors must safeguard food security to preempt food inflation and stabilize supply chains by adjusting planting schedules and crop varieties, restricting expansion in drought-prone regions, and leveraging climate forecasts. Finally, the energy sector is urged to closely manage reservoir levels using predictive data, to safeguard sufficient water availability for power generation, irrigation, and public use, while diversifying power sources by optimising operations and integrating solar and wind energy.
Rising Jakarta PM2.5 & PM10 levels — When a prolonged dry season hits, Jakarta’s air quality stagnates, hovering between moderate and unhealthy as pollutants linger in the atmosphere well past regular seasonal highs.
Surging fire activity across fire-prone regions — Weeks without rain fuel rapid fire surges across Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua, where dry peatlands and slash-and-burn clearing push fire activity toward historic El Niño peaks.
Methodology
Air quality data
Air quality readings on this page come from government-operated monitors — the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK, around 115 stations nationwide), the meteorological agency (BMKG, around 25), and provincial environment agencies (DLH, whose Jakarta network contributes a dozen reference-grade sites). Raw readings are collected station by station and passed through automated quality control that flags implausible data: negatives and error codes, exact zeros, out-of-range ISPU values, physically impossible concentrations, and the signatures of a stuck instrument. Stations that report only the national index (ISPU) are converted back to micrograms per cubic metre using the official breakpoints (Permen LHK P.14/2020), and a daily value is published only where the station covered at least twelve hours of that day. Around 155 monitors currently clear that bar.
Thermal anomaly
Fire activity is satellite-derived. We use NASA’s VNP14A1 product — the daily thermal-anomaly composite from the VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi-NPP satellite. It identifies pixels radiating substantially more heat than their surroundings, which is an actively burning fire, and records each one’s fire radiative power in megawatts: the rate at which the fire is releasing energy. Totalling that power across an island therefore measures how intensely the landscape is burning.
Exposure estimates
Population exposure is mapped from TAP (Tracking Air Pollution), a daily global PM2.5 product at about 11 km resolution that fuses ground measurements, satellite aerosol readings and chemical transport modelling. Checked against Indonesian monitors, TAP carries a significant negative bias. It reads systematically lower than the stations do, by an amount that varies from place to place. We therefore correct it with a scaling factor fitted from the monitors described above. That factor is computed locally, so that each place is corrected by the instruments nearest to it, and it fades back to TAP’s own values far from any monitor. We then weigh the corrected map by population (Gridded Population of the World v4.11, at 1 km) to estimate the number of people breathing air at each pollution level.
A fuller description of the methodology and data sources can be found in our data methodology document.
Disclaimer
The maps and designations displayed on this website do not imply any opinion on the part of CREA regarding the legal status of any country, territory, city, or its authorities, nor regarding the delimitation of frontiers or boundaries. The term “country” may also refer to territories or areas.
2026 Indonesia Air Quality Tracker | CREA