Spline interpolation as a way of mapping pollen emission sources

Abstract

The article develops a new method of spatiotemporal modelling of possible locations of ragweed areas and estimation of pollen emission intensity of these areas. The method uses spline approximation with automatic computations of typical pollen production models in the R language. It applies a number of approaches eliminating the uncertainty of various parameters that should be taken into consideration for this modelling. The authors have consolidated some experimental data on the amount of Ambrosia pollen in the air depending on environmental conditions, and found some new possible ragweed pollen sources on the territory of the city of Vinnytsia and the adjacent villages. The study used spline approximation of the first (lines) and second (parabolas) orders were applied. Data of bi-hourly pollen concentrations obtained at the pollen monitoring site of National Pirogov Memorial Medical University (Vinnytsia). To perform the approximation, wind speed, wind direction and relative humidity were taken into the consideration. The authors used the polar coordinate system to formalize the problem. PRA Finder computer program was developed, which has been successfully tested on real data and for which a certificate of copyright registration has been obtained in Ukraine. As a result of the method application, the known areas were corroborated and new possible plots were revealed. The comparison of the forecasted areas for 2014 with the actual ones showed a close match. However, it should be taken into consideration that the proposed method is viable only when applied under the condition that the wind velocity does not exceed 4 m/sec and the relative humidity is between 20 % and 90 %.