Abstract
We present some first insights into hourly automatic pollen measurements from two campaigns performed at MeteoSwiss (spring to early summer 2015 and 2016). While the focus of the campaigns was on device validation, the data obtained provided the possibility to carry out a statistical analysis to estimate airborne pollen concentrations at hourly resolution. We compare the time series from the automatic system with reference manual measurements to assess the validity of the automatic system. As expected, during peak immission periods there is a strong correlation between manual and automatic measurements. On days with average pollen concentrations less than 100 grains per cubic metre, only the high-sampling automatic system provides reasonable results. We show how this system provides sub-daily exposition patterns, which cannot easily be derived from the manual measurements, and comment on their relevance for patient information systems. Finally, we present a selection of daily cycles for pollen immission at the observation site and analyse the influence of weather parameters on pollen emission and immission.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Anne-Marie Rachoud for counting the reference pollen slides.
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Chappuis, C., Tummon, F., Clot, B. et al. Automatic pollen monitoring: first insights from hourly data. Aerobiologia 36, 159–170 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-019-09619-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10453-019-09619-6