Weather Channel pushes pollen advisories that might cause sneezing, but not PM2.5 EPA action days that might increase cancer risk?
Today [January 25, 2014] the Weather Channel app pushed out a pollen advisory for Los Angeles. We’ve had their app installed for at least a year, and this is first time we’ve seen that push notification. (There was also a high surf advisory today for Los Angeles. Some of you may be wondering if we also got a polar vortex advisory out here; no we didn’t.)
Mind you, pollen advisory went along with an EPA “Moderate” PM2.5 warning. That’s still above the World Health Organization’s PM2.5 dust average annual exposure limit guideline, but it’s not the “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” (Sensitive Groups including those athletically inclinded) and it wasn’t a PM2.5 concentration of 40 micrograms per cubic meter, waaaay above the 24 microgram WHO 24-hour average guideline, and even above the 35 microgram limit by the EPA and several other countries that we had two days ago out here.
Don’t entirely understand the Weather Channel’s logic in setting up the push notifications this way. Yes, pollen is bad (and we guess surf advisories are bad), but we had an EPA action day alert for PM2.5 just last week due to the Colby fire, and you’d think cancer risk would outweigh sneezing.
I guess there is still the perception that you can’t do anything about automobile exhaust (or forest fire combustion), even if it might contribute to cancer, but for those with pollen issues some people apparently just pop a Bendaryl.
But, as we explained in our last blog post, there is something you can do about PM2.5 pollution due to automobile exhaust and forest fires. Those same techniques apply to pollen. Even though the inexpensive home sensors now available together with our free app still can’t readily distinguish between pollen and automobile exhaust, they can see that there is something in the air. And they can tell you how well your air purifiers are working. (Probably not as well as you think; see our reviews here.) You can finally tell when your indoor air is clean (and hence clean of both pollen and that other nasty stuff.) If it is a high-pollen count day, you might even try to rev up your air purifiers to get the air cleaner than normal. That’s not something that was possible, but now it’s pretty straightforward.