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.
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