Forecasting Betula and Poaceae airborne pollen concentrations on a 3-hourly resolution in Augsburg, Germany: toward automatically generated, real-time predictions

Abstract

Airborne allergenic pollen impact the health of a great part of the global population. Under climate change conditions, the abundance of airborne pollen has been rising dramatically and so is the effect on sensitized individuals. The first line of allergy management is allergen avoidance, which, to date, is by rule achieved via forecasting of daily pollen concentrations. The aim of this study was to elaborate on 3-hourly predictive models, one of the very few to the best of our knowledge, attempting to forecast pollen concentration based on near-real-time automatic pollen measurements. The study was conducted in Augsburg, Germany, during four years (2016–2019) focusing on Betula and Poaceae pollen, the most abundant and allergenic in temperate climates. ARIMA and dynamic regression models were employed, as well as machine learning techniques, viz. artificial neural networks and neural network autoregression models. Air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, air pressure, sunshine duration, diffuse radiation, and wind speed were additionally considered for the development of the models. It was found that air temperature and precipitation were the most significant variables for the prediction of airborne pollen concentrations. At such fine temporal resolution, our forecasting models performed well showing their ability to explain most of the variability of pollen concentrations for both taxa. However, predictive power of Betula forecasting model was higher achieving R2 up to 0.62, whereas Poaceae up to 0.55. Neural autoregression was superior in forecasting Betula pollen concentrations, whereas, for Poaceae, seasonal ARIMA performed best. The good performance of seasonal ARIMA in describing variability of pollen concentrations of both examined taxa suggests an important role of plants’ phenology in observed pollen abundance. The present study provides novel insight on per-hour forecasts to be used in real-time mobile apps by pollen allergic patients. Despite the huge need for real-time, short-term predictions for everyday clinical practice, extreme weather events, like in the year 2019 in our case, still comprise an obstacle toward highly performing forecasts at such fine timescales, highlighting that there is still a way to go to this direction.

Alnus Airborne Pollen Trends during the Last 26 Years for Improving Machine Learning-Based Forecasting Methods

“…This study also pointed out that the variables that most influenced the RF model were temperature and rainfall. A previous study conducted in Germany using autoregression and neural network approaches to predict Betula and Poaceae airborne pollen registered an r 2 value ranging from 0.13 to 0.62 for Betula and 0.03 to 0.55 for Poaceae [80]. These results are slightly lower than those obtained in the present work.…”

Biodiversity, abundance, seasonal and diurnal airborne pollen distribution patterns at two different heights in Augsburg, Germany

“…(Helbig et al, 2004;Oteros et al, 2015a,b;Sofiev and Bergmann, 2012). On an hourly scale, definitely such predictions are still a challenge, but there are promising results already towards this direction (Muzalyova et al, 2021).…”

Climate change and global health: A call to more research and more action

“…Pollen exposure has also been shown to weaken innate immunity against respiratory viruses. 65,66 To mitigate the health consequences of TA, it is essential to monitor and forecast atmospheric pollen levels 67 as well as other meteorological factors.…”