Pollen Count Severity Category Classifier

Pollen numbers are difficult to interpret without knowing which plant group produced them. This classifier converts a non-negative airborne pollen count into a clear low, moderate, high, or very-high category using common allergy reference thresholds for tree, grass, and weed pollen. It also returns the normalized pollen type and the boundaries used for that scale, making the result easy to display, audit, or use in an automated alert. The calculation is deterministic, requires no network lookup, and rejects unsupported pollen types instead of applying a misleading generic threshold.

Choose the pollen type before interpreting the count

A raw pollen count does not have one universal meaning because tree, grass, and weed pollen are released and measured at very different typical concentrations. Start by supplying the count in grains per cubic meter and identify the source as tree, grass, or weed. The classifier normalizes capitalization and surrounding spaces, so values such as TREE and tree are treated consistently.

It deliberately does not guess a source from a plant name or accept an unknown group. That strict behavior matters: a count that is moderate on a tree scale may already be high on another scale. By returning an error for an unrecognized type, the capability prevents a plausible-looking but scientifically mismatched label from entering a forecast, notification, or patient-facing display.

Counts must be finite and non-negative. Decimal counts are accepted, which is useful when an upstream instrument or aggregation process reports an average rather than a whole-number observation. The response repeats the normalized count and pollen type so downstream systems can confirm exactly what was classified.

Understand the category boundaries

The calculation uses widely cited allergy reporting bands. Tree pollen is low below 15, moderate from 15 through values below 90, high from 90 through values below 1,500, and very high at 1,500 or above. Grass pollen is low below 5, moderate from 5 through values below 20, high from 20 through values below 200, and very high at 200 or above.

Weed pollen is low below 10, moderate from 10 through values below 50, high from 50 through values below 500, and very high at 500 or above. Boundary comparisons are exact: a value equal to the start of a band belongs to that band. Personal symptoms vary with sensitization, exposure duration, medication, location, and other conditions, so the result should support general information and operational decisions rather than replace individualized clinical advice.

Use consistent classifications in products and workflows

Use the classifier after obtaining a pollen observation from a monitoring station, laboratory feed, or your own approved dataset. Pass each observation with its matching source group, then store or display the returned category beside the original value. Weather applications can map the four stable category strings to colors, while alerting workflows can trigger only for high or very-high results.

Data teams can also classify historical records before charting them, ensuring that the same boundary logic is applied across every row and every release of a product. Because the algorithm has no network requests, random values, current-time dependency, or mutable state, the same input always produces the same output. That makes results reproducible in tests and audits.

Keep the source count and pollen type with the result because monitoring organizations may publish values with different sampling periods or local conventions. If your provider explicitly defines another scale, follow that provider instead of silently mixing its counts with these common reference bands.