GIOŚ data - air and water quality from state monitoring

Knowledge base · July 10, 2026

The second great public source of environmental data in Poland is GIOŚ (the Chief Inspectorate of Environmental Protection), which runs the State Environmental Monitoring (PMŚ). Its data is an excellent reference for your own measurements - and valuable reading in its own right.

What GIOŚ provides

• Air quality - measurements from the national network of stations (including PM2.5 and PM10 dust, nitrogen dioxide, ozone), presented on the air-quality portal and available through an API.
• Water monitoring - assessments of the status of water bodies and measurement data (the water-quality portal).
• Other PMŚ components (noise, soils, nature - depending on the programme).

Where exactly to look - a worked example

Poland’s GIOŚ serves here as a case study of how a national environmental service publishes data - the split between a real-time air-quality API and periodic water datasets repeats in most countries.

(Addresses checked on 12 August 2026.)

⚠️ A lesson worth more than the addresses: the old version of this API is dead. Calls in the form api.gios.gov.pl/pjp-api/rest/… (without v1) return HTTP 410 Gone with a message pointing to the new version. If you find a tutorial from a few years ago, it almost certainly uses those retired addresses. Whatever public API you build on, treat 404/410 as a signal to update your integration, not as a temporary outage - and check the status code, not just whether “something came back”.

A second difference from the old API: field names in the response are descriptive and in Polish ("Kod stacji", "Nazwa stacji", "WGS84 φ N"), i.e. they contain spaces and diacritics - when parsing, address them by their full key.

Water data are a different league from air. There is no real-time stream here: water monitoring is published in cycles, as status assessments and periodic datasets. If you are looking for river data “as of now”, the right source is the hydrological service (see the IMGW example), not the environmental inspectorate. That division - air in real time, water in cycles - is not a Polish peculiarity; it follows from how the two monitoring networks are built.

What to use it for

• Reference: compare your dust sensor with the nearest official GIOŚ station to judge its reliability and set the local reading within a broader picture.
• Context: the GIOŚ water status assessments help you understand the “background” against which your measurements sit.

In practice

As with IMGW data, manually setting GIOŚ data against your own measurements can be tedious. LimnoLog can, through connectors, pull in data from public APIs (including the GIOŚ network) alongside your measurements - e.g. a reading from your own dust sensor and a measurement from a reference station on a single chart. More in the article How to combine your own measurements with public data.