Pollen Forecast

Willow pollen - March to April

Even though I do suffer with hayfever, I've never really looked into that the problem may be. It seems that there are five main types of pollen that can affect us:

1. Tree pollen from March to around August
2. Grasses from April to August
3. Crops around April to June
4. Weeds from April to around September
5. Fungal spores, which can be airborne all year round

There are a couple of handy pollen calendars, that can not only help you diagnose what pollen affects you, but can also then be used to help you prepare for when you may need to medicate. the first is available from Zirtek, it's a well laid out calendar and is probably my prefered one, although the Met Office calendar is a nice basic calendar and it's nice to have them both for comparison.

Data on pollen are provided in the UK by the University of Worcester and more recently the Met Office. I recently came across the pollen forecast map that is available online and produced by the Met Office, this map has a great user interface and hovering over the severity key at each general location provides details of what pollen may be floating around. You can also set your home location to ensure that you can see the severity rating closest to you. There are also different options you can choose ranging from UV to surface pressure. It's well worth a visit.

If you want a quick and easy general forecast, see the University of Worcester forecast that simply has spots ranging from green to purple for severity over the pollen types of Tree, Grasses, Weeds and fungal spores.

Watch this clip to see what the Met Office is doing to ensure that they provide the best pollen forecast they can:




Unfortunately I couldn't get a widget to add to the blog for pollen ratings for the UK. I'll copy the links from this post over to the links page for easy access.

I hope that by using these tools that we can have a happy hayfever free (or at least hayfever minimised) summer!