It might not even be the grasses growing around your house, or even in your town or city, making you sneeze.
In the right conditions — like the hot humidity of a thunderstorm — the pollen grain beanbag can rupture and spill its starchy "beans". For wind-pollinating plants, who want to spread their pollen far and wide, there's no point in releasing their precious cargo when it's raining, as it'll simply be washed onto the ground.For this reason, the first dry day after a long spell of wet weather — like theWhen is peak pollen season in your capital city?Brisbane: high pollen present most of the year, peaking in summerWe saw this happen on Halloween. For most of October, Victoria's wet weather kept pollen levels low.
"With all this rain we've had, there's so much grass, and we potentially could be getting high pollen numbers into December or even January."Traps like these have been used to monitor pollen levels since the 1950s. They're expensive, but use lasers to analyse the contents of air as it's sucked through a device, and can report pollen levels in real time.
cLiMaTe cHaNgE