Increasing the number of allergenic pollen species in SILAM forecasts

Abstract

SILAM has been among the first regional dispersion models to develop the ability to compute pollen emission and dispersion. For previous seasons forecasts have been provided for birch, grasses, olive and ragweed. For the current season this list has been extended by alder and mugwort. The growing number of modelled species makes it possible to draw conclusions from the existing experiences, related to the features of the input data and algorithms applied to describe the pollen emission. We demonstrate, that the currently available options in SILAM allow adding new pollen species with minimal development effort and limited input data, to allow forecasts with comparable quality to the previously developed taxa.