New tool predicts how pollen travels through city air

Every spring, lakhs of people suffering from allergies brace for sneezing fits and itchy eyes as trees release pollen into the air. Now, a team of researchers from France and the U.S. has built a tool that can predict exactly how pollen travels through a city once the wind picks it up.

In the study, published in Physics of Fluids, the team created a computer simulation method they called DF-PIBM, short for ‘direct-forcing porous immersed boundary method’. Basically the researchers wrote computer code that treated a tree like a sponge, with air flowing through its leaves and branches, and then tracked pollen grains as the wind carried them off.