Brace for a possible big change in your local weather forecast. Soon you might hear Pollen Forecasts being read with the same data and predictive factors as weather.
The space agency NASA is contributing its technology to the discovery of ways to identify areas of high pollen risk. So when the wind blows, you’ll soon know when to protect your nose.
It works like this: Weather data is combined with facts about when high concentrations of pollen from plants are likely to occur. Using the same pattern technologies used to predict the weather, forecasters can crunch data to create pollen maps that will show how far and intensely the tiny grains of allergy-creating plant dust will blow.
That may result in being able to give, for example, a 72-hour warning about when pollen is like to be at its highest concentrations in a given area.
Believe it or not, satellites are currently being use to track the pollen of select species of trees such as junipers. These studies are providing a foundation for predicting the movement and density of other plant pollens as well.
Information such as this can give allergy sufferers a needed head start on using medications designed to limit the impact of allergy symptoms.