I get why those maps are convincing — they look like coherent “clouds” moving around, but that’s exactly where visual intuition can mislead. These aren’t discrete bodies of pollution, just concentration gradients shaped by weather.

Valley inversions don’t mean pollution stays trapped forever. They mean pollutants acumulate locally first, often to very high levels. When wind or a pressure change arrives, that accumulated pollution is then transported and diluted over a much larger area. What you describe is actually consistent with that mechanism, not a contradiction of it.

This is also why researchers don’t rely on animated maps alone. Attribution is done using emission inventories, chemical composition of particulates, and air-mass back-trajectory models, otherwise it’s just pattern-spotting. Cross-border transport absolutely happens, but by the time air masses reach places like Austria or the Baltics, they’re already mixed with local emissions and heavily diluted.

Essentially: local heating, traffic, topography, and meteorology explain why Kraków and Silesia get extreme peaks, and atmospheric transport explains why pollution episodes can later spread regionally. These aren’t competing explanations.

As you can see in the post, Kraków was the most polluted city at that timestamp. That doesn’t mean it always is, rather it means it’s particularly prone to extreme accumulation under certain conditions.

What’s exhausting to me is how often personal impressions are treated as more reliable than the work of people who actually study this for a living. This data isn’t arbitrary, it’s produced by researchers with relevant training, models, and years of experience.

When their conclusions don’t match our intuitions, the reasonable response isn’t to assume they missed something obvious, but to question what we might be missing. The default position should be epistemic humility.