Histamine Histories – 2025 AAIR Pollen Count Reports For Central And Western New York (But Based In Rochester)

Above: Eyes are watering just looking at it. Sunrise and pollen, courtesy of Kamusal Alan and available at PxHere.

Charts Updated – 27 October 20255 – Final Data Plotted

Introduction

If you live in the Rochester/Western New York area and ever wondered "what was in the air yesterday and when am I gonna stop sneezing?" This page might just be for you.

The charts below are made possible by the highly relevant and important (certainly to me, now three years into my fourth round of serums at one of the AAIR offices) work done by Dr. Albert Hartel (5 stars), Allergy Asthma Immunology of Rochester (AAIR, www.aair.info).

From the Facebook Page: AAIR is the only pollen counting station, providing the only pollen counts for Rochester, the Finger Lakes, Syracuse and west to Olean! We appreciate you supporting AAIR so that we can continue to provide this service free of charge for allergy and asthma sufferers, health care providers, newspapers, television weather departments, other media and for national research!

I discovered (luck timing! Although I didn't start collecting the info until October of last year) that near-daily pollen counts were being provided on their Facebook Page from March to October and I immediately took to collecting that information for the specific purpose of understanding what it is that makes my life miserable four weeks each year (two in the spring, two in the fall. Clockwork.). Given my increasingly long-term commitment to the CNY/WNY area, my goal for this and future tracking pages is to determine when, roughly, to start doubling up on the Zyrtec and adding the daily shots of Flonase. I'm posting my long-term tracking here in case it ends up serving the same benefit to anyone else wondering what was outside a given morning and how long did it take to go away.

Notes

  • If a date is missing, AAIR did not report any measurements for that day (esp. weekends).
  • Figures are made with Easy Charts because it's free, not hobbled by "pro" versions, and does exactly what I need it to do. My thanks to Kiran Potphode for making a great little WordPress plugin. I'm still playing with the formatting.
  • Bold text at top-right are clickable to download each image.
  • You can click on the items in the Legends to make the lines disappear or reappear (if some of the numbers cluster too tightly and you can't tell which is which based on the color schemes)
  • Charts are broken down into Total Pollen, Trees (then High Count Trees and Low Count Trees for ease of reading), Grasses, and Weeds and report on that which is in the AAIR air (sorry, I had to).
  • Samples are taken with a Rotorod. See https://www.pollen.com/help/rotorod or https://www.biologydiscussion.com/palynology/samplers-conventionally-used-for-trapping-pollen-grains/64703 for light details.

Total Pollen Report

Reported from AAIR as A ("0", absent), L ("1", low, > 0-14 grains/m3), M ("2", moderate, > 15-89 grains/m3), H ("3", high, > 90-1,499 grains/m3), and VH ("4", very high, > 1,500 grains/m3, just plant yourself in front of the air filter). This plot might get flipped to a line chart once more data comes in.

Tree Pollen Counts

Everything reported, including the daily total.

Tree Pollen Counts – High Tree Counts

Includes anything reaching 50 grains/m3 in the reporting session.

Tree Pollen Counts – Low Tree Counts

"Little things mean a lot." – Edith Lindeman

Everything in the list has been detected at least once in the reporting session.

Grass Pollen Counts

Grass pollen has been detected as of May 12th, but the kind of pollen was not reported (as of 6 June). grassA/B/C are kept as spaceholders in the event.

Weed Pollen Counts

This chart is a space-holder for when the first round of weed pollen is detected.