How Saans works

Saans (سانس, “breath”) is a free air-quality site for Pakistan by DanixSoft, a software studio in Lahore. It covers 47 places: 16 cities and the main areas of Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar.

The data

• Modelled air quality (every place): the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) global forecast, served by the free Open-Meteo Air-Quality API under CC BY 4.0. Resolution is 0.4° (about 45 km), updated hourly, with a 5-day forecast. We label it “modelled” wherever it appears.
• Monitoring stations (where available): the latest reading of the nearest station within 15 km, from the World Air Quality Index project (aqicn.org), with the station name and its own time. Not switched on in this build (it needs an API token).
• Scale: the US EPA Air Quality Index. Particle sub-indices use 24-hour rolling averages (as calculated by Open-Meteo); the overall AQI is the highest pollutant sub-index.

Freshness

When you open a page, your browser asks Open-Meteo for the latest values and keeps them for 15 minutes. The pages themselves are rebuilt from a fresh snapshot several times a day, so search engines and people without JavaScript see recent numbers too. This build’s snapshot: 4 Nov, 5:45 pm PKT. Every number shows its own time.

The verdicts and health advice

“Go out?”, “Exercise outdoors?”, “Open windows?” and “School run?” map the AQI category to the US EPA’s published cautionary statements, written in plain words. The school answer uses the forecast for 7–9 am on the next school morning. The advice is general information, not medical advice.

Advisories

School closures and government advisories are listed only with a link to the official notification. We do not repeat news reports or forwarded messages.

Limits

• A model is not a measurement. Absolute values can be off; the trend is more reliable.
• Areas inside a city usually share one model square, so their modelled values match.
• Station readings depend on stations being online and calibrated, which Saans cannot check.

Money

Saans is free, with no accounts and no ads. The mask and purifier guides may later carry clearly marked affiliate links; they will never change what the guides say.

Contact: hello@danixsoft.com. Content last reviewed 2026-11-04.