About Kabut
Last updated: 30 September 2026
Kabut is Indonesian for haze. Every dry season, fires on peatland and plantation land in Sumatra and Kalimantan send smoke across cities that can be hundreds of kilometres away, and the question people ask each morning is simple: how bad is the air where I am, and is it getting worse?
Kabut answers that in one place. It puts the air quality reading for each tracked city beside the satellite fire detections the smoke is coming from, and since September 2026 beside the volcanoes and volcanic ash advisories that affect the same skies.
What you can do with it
- See the worst air in the country right now. The home screen ranks every tracked Indonesian city by US AQI, worst first, with the PM2.5 concentration, the number of fire hotspots detected in the last 24 hours, and how far the worst city is from the nearest fire.
- Look up one city in full. Each of the 108 city pages shows the current reading, where it came from (a monitoring station or an atmospheric model), the pollutants behind it, Indonesia's own ISPU index beside the US AQI, a five-day hourly forecast, the trend over the last day, week or month, and the nearest fire with the direction the wind is blowing from.
- Know what to do about it. Every reading comes with plain advice for its class — when to close the windows, when a mask is worth wearing and which kind, when to seek care. The advice is the same for every city in the same class, and it is written once, in English and Indonesian.
- Watch the fires. The map draws NASA's active fire detections for Indonesia and its neighbours, with the smoke layer and any ash advisories on top.
- Follow the volcanoes. The volcano page lists which Indonesian volcanoes are erupting according to the Smithsonian's eruption record and which carry an ash advisory for aviation right now — two different facts, shown side by side rather than merged into one made-up level.
- Keep your cities. Star a city and it stays on your device. There is no account, and nothing on this site is behind a sign-in.
Where the numbers come from
Kabut does not operate sensors. It collects public data every hour, checks it, converts it to one scale, and says plainly where each number came from:
- WAQI station readings where a monitoring station reports near a city.
- Open-Meteo air quality model data (CAMS) everywhere else, and for the forecast. Licensed CC BY 4.0; Kabut modifies it by computing the US AQI from its PM2.5 values.
- NASA FIRMS active fire detections from the VIIRS instrument.
- NOAA Aviation Weather Center SIGMETs for volcanic ash.
- Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program for eruption records.
- GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) for place names in search.
The methodology page explains how each number is calculated, what the six classes mean, and the limits you should know about before relying on any of it.
What Kabut is not
Kabut is an information service, not a medical or emergency service. For official air quality statements in Indonesia, see the Ministry of Environment and BMKG; for volcano alert levels, see PVMBG at magma.esdm.go.id. If you have trouble breathing, chest pain, or feel faint, seek medical care — don't wait for the air to clear.
Who makes it
Kabut is built and maintained independently, and it is funded by advertising. Ads appear on the ranking and list pages. They never appear on a city page, where the health advice is, and never on the map.
Contact
Corrections, questions, or a city you would like tracked: hello@kabut.net
Read the privacy policy for exactly what the site and the app collect — which is very little.