Media release

From: AAAS

A new statistical modeling approach may help allergy sufferers prepare for the upcoming grass pollen season, by forecasting the severity of grass pollen based on air temperature, precipitation, and the sum of a site’s pollen concentrations. Additionally, the study presents a new long-term assessment approach that describes year-to-year variations in a site’s total pollen concentration, finding that climate change may increase future allergy season severity by up to 60%. These approaches may together benefit individual allergy sufferers and the health care sector as a whole in the short term, while helping societies prepare their health systems for the impacts of climate change in the long term. While up to 40% of Europeans suffer from pollen allergies, there is currently no clear guidance on how best to prepare for upcoming allergy seasons, and it has remained unknown how allergy season severity may change as the climate continues to warm. To address these gaps, Alexander Kurganskiy and colleagues built a statistical regression model to simulate and predict the seasonal pollen integral (SPIn), which is the sum of pollen concentrations at a site throughout the entire grass pollen season, at 28 pollen-monitoring stations in Northwest Europe. They determined that there was no connection between pollen severity at different sites, suggesting each site should be considered individually. To develop the long-term assessment approach, Kurganskiy et al. studied year-to-year variations in grass SPIn based on the net production of organic carbon of grasses at 34 pollen monitoring stations in Northwest Europe. When they used the Joint UK Land Environmental Simulator (JULES) model to simulate the net production of organic carbon for more than 407 pollen seasons at these stations between 1996 and 2016, they found that small variations in grass growth led to large variations in the quantity of pollen. “Our findings have the potential to be used in atmospheric dispersion models for Northwest Europe or larger regions throughout the world where sufficient robust pollen data are available,” Kurganskiy et al. write.