Are you oversensitive to pollen? Do trees make you sneeze? Then you may be in for this spring's

It's only mid-March, but while Boston is still digging itself out from under the "blizzard of '93", pollen will soon be in the air, bringing with it yet another barrage of Kleenex and antihistamine medications.

But what will stop a runny nose? Which of the hundreds of over-the-counter medications will work? And which won't?

Most importantly, "Why on earth is this happening to me?" will be a common sniffle among the 10 to 15 percent of the population affected by seasonal allergies.

Allergies come most severely in the fall, when plants such as ragweed germinate, and in the spring, when trees and grasses release their pollen into the air.

WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce W. Schwoegler says that some allergens, such as tree pollen, are in constant supply. But the peak season for the Boston area, says Schwoegler, is late May and early June.

Schwoegler says that dry, breezy, warm days can stimulate a high release of pollen. In the Boston area, oak pollen seems the worst offender, he says.

The body's often violent response to spring is actually a reaction to specific chemicals on pollen known as allergens. Common allergies are the result of hyper-sensitivity to a rather innocuous antigen.

In recent years, Schwoegler has been working with a local allergist, experimenting with methods of forecasting bad allergy days.

To make his predictions, Schwoegler takes into account the forecasts for wind speed, morning humidity, temperature, the pollen counts from the previous year, and cloud cover.

According to Schwoegler, sunlight can stimulate trees to release more pollen, and winds 10 and 20 m.p.h. are the allergen's favorite conditions. Winds much stronger than 20 m.p.h. carry the pollen into the upper atmosphere, far away from the beleaguered lungs of sufferers.

According to Dr. Elliot Israel, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston's Beth-Israel Hospital allergy clinic, a common misconception is sufferers describing allergies as "rose fever." In fact, Israel says, this term is inaccurate because most of the common spring-time allergies are caused by pollen from grasses and trees not roses.

Blooming flowers can serve, however, as a rather colorful and ominous warning that their other friends in the vegetable kingdom are about to release their pollen on the public.

The antibody which recognizes pollen, as well as other common allergens, is a protein called IgE. People with allergies, a genetic trait, have elevated levels of this protein and therefore respond much more quickly and violently to the rather harmless pollen grain.

IgE stimulates a number of chemicals, the most common of which is histamine. Histamine is responsible for a number of rather unsightly and uncomfortable responses in the body. It can act on to make breathing more difficult by stimulating the production of excess mucus in the bronchial tract, and also cause inflammation by enlarging blood vessels.