Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2.10 Integrated Modelling of Allergenic Pollen:
Phenological Stages, Pollen Release and Transport
for Different Species
Pilvi Siljamo
1
, Mikhail Sofiev
1
, Hanna Ranta
2
, Tapio Linkosalo
3
,
Siegfried
4
5
6
7
Jaeger , Regula Gehrig , Alix Rassmussen , Elena Severova ,
Ari Karppinen ,
and Jaakko Kukkonen
1
1
1
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland,
2
University of Turku, Aerobiological Unit, Finland,
3
Finnish Forest Research Institute, Finland,
4
NHO Klinik der Medizinischen Universitaet Wien, Austria,
5
Meteo Swiss, Switzerland,
6
Danish Meteorological Institute, Denmark,
7
Moscow State University, Russia
Abstract
Pollen can be considered as one of types of atmospheric natural “pollution”
with direct health impact. There are many different pollen grains in the atmosphere
during spring and summer. Some of them are harmless but some other, like birch,
olive, alder, grasses and ragweed, can have remarkable allergenic impacts. Pollen
grains of wind pollinated species can be transported from tens of kilometres (e.g.,
some grass species and mugwort) to thousands of kilometres (e.g., birch and
ragweed) depending on size and other features of the pollen grain. In all cases,
pollen prediction is not a local problem but rather requires an integrated modelling
system, which would include both numerical weather prediction and dispersion
models, as well as models for start and end of flowering and pollen release charac-
terization. Current paper presents such a system developed in Finnish Meteorological
Institute, which has been used and evaluated over Europe since 2005.
Keywords
Birch, grass, long-range transport, phenological model, pollen
1. Introduction
Some species, such as many types of trees, start their flowering when a certain
level of accumulated heat, often expressed as a daily temperature sum (the cor-
responding model is often referred as thermal-type model) is reached. For some
