Pollen forecast

[wkossen]

Hi,

i've searched both the forum as well as google. i haven't found the answer.

I'ld like to add a way to see the pollen forecast from sites like pollennieuws.nl, which is also on Dutch teletext page 714 (which probably is utterly useless). This contains a forecast of how bad the hay-fever will be.

That would be rather useful to for instance set air-purifiers to high settings during particularly bad days. Now pollen are also particulate matter, so i could probably do that with openAQ plugin or other ways to get air-quality data, but i prefer to be precise and there is the hooikoortsradar app and the pollennieuws site, so this data is available somehow.

either domoticz enthousiasts arent allergic, or they simply haven't found a way yet... hoping to find any pointers

Thanks for your help

Cheers
Willem

[kiddigital]

Scraping information from sites is not a good nor reliable way to get information. If you can find a steady API, JSON/XML/RSS feed, etc. that could be a starting point to get information from.

I guess you ‘just’ need the info relevant to your location as things differ a lot from location to location.

As a lot of these services measure point roughly cover a larger area, it might be useful to do your own measurements as they are more accurate for your specific location.

Hope this gives some direction.

[wkossen]

I completely agree that scraping is not a good idea. I was looking for an api but not finding one. I know the data is available, but apparently not publicly, or I am bad at searching for it.

i was hoping someone had found a way to get the data.

[Toulon7559]

Have also been looking for actual/uptodate & online pollen-datafiles to be remotely called by application/API.
Unfortunately most pollen-info accessible online as datafile seems historic, not actual, nor future.

Leiden University has a very elaborate weekly survey:
actual info, not a forecast, useful if you live near them, but validity/value rapidly decreases with distance.
No clear path how to extract the data.
The html-code of the webpage has no easy handgrip.
Perhaps a workaround is using the print-command on the webpage to make a pdf-file, and then extract from pdf to another format, from which to make webtables (or similar presentation formats):
pragmatically requires at least 2 steps of operator-intervention. In the end is scraping, but in a different way.
Perhaps somebody is clever enough to provide a background script for automation of those functions?
Application of the data is subject to the copyright-clause on the webpage!

If you are willing to pay, for actual forecastfiles probably Breezometer can help you, but rather unclear how they provide the data, what data and at what price.

PalDat provides data with a different 'commercial' model:
as compensation a contribution is required in the form of own measured pollen-info [ which is IMHO even more difficult than measuring dust & gas]

For people with lower/no budget possibly Copernicus AMS has an entry which seems applicable for your question:
see https://ads.atmosphere.copernicus.eu/cd ... s?tab=form
As usual for CAMS, rather complete, with a wide catalogue of settings and (in the bottom selection box) a download instruction for the datafile, but the 2 formats of the datafile (GRIB and NetCDF) are unknown to me.
In the URL mentioned above for CAMS, the available pollen-info is limited to Alder (in Dutch ~ Elzenkatjes) and Dust, although they have visibly planned ahead with grey boxes which for birch, grass, olive and ragweed are present as 'reservations'.
Alder is one of the first pollen-types to strongly appear (already in winter, early in spring), and in that way any actual data will help 'victims', but in the Netherlands birch and grass as later important pollutors would be equally desirable, as well as ragweed (~ Ambrosia) becoming more and more annoying.
For those latter 3 pollutors no online, actual & local data-source found yet, except in the graphs of some websites, and in tables as from Leiden University.

If somebody is willing & able to download and to dissect a datafile from CAMS, we have some knowledge whether such file may be useful ........