Environmental assessment of allergenic risk provoked by airborne grass pollen through forecast model in a Mediterranean region

Abstract

Airborne grass pollen is the main cause of allergenic diseases in many parts of the world although its frequency differs regionally. This risk could be included in the context of urban air pollution and climate change as environmental hazard and factors provoking allergies. The main objective of this study is to construct a local statistical forecasting model that takes the peculiarities of the daily average grass airborne pollen concentrations from an urban area placed in a city in the SW of the Mediterranean region with data from 24 years. It takes into account the temporal distribution of meteorological parameters (rainfall, relative humidity, maximum, mean and minimum temperature) for assessing the trend in the main pollen season. The Shuffle Complex Evolution Metropolis Algorithm has been used as an optimization function the Root Mean Square Error to accomplish this objective. Aerobiological survey was carried out with grass pollen data in Badajoz (SW Spain) using a 7-day volumetric sampler. The grass main pollen season lasted on average 88 days (April 18th to July 14th). One equation composed of two terms describes the model proposed to forecast airborne pollen. This equation integrates the short-term influence of the grass pollen concentration of the previous 10 days, as well as the actual pollen values, which is weighted by fitting coefficients applied to the most representative meteorological variables. Results obtained sustain the advisability of the developed model. Despite of goodness adjustment of the results to the obtained model, further long term analysis are needed regarding to other Mediterranean cities for expanding the knowledge of the trends and comparing the forecast in the Mediterranean region.