Japan

I’m bombarded at this time of year with reminders, notices, descriptions, and articles telling me about the importance of frost delays. Apparently, frost delays are essential for the health of the turf.

I showed how weather data can be used to calculate a daily soil water balance. One can adjust the rootzone characteristics, and the timing and amount of irrigation, so that the calculations are representative of what one wants to know.

One can calculate a water budget for a particular location to get an estimate of how much irrigation water is required. This article from the Green Section Record describes those calculations.

I don’t like turf diseases. If there is any fun in them, for me, it lies in only two things. First, is it a particularly well-named disease? Second, how awful are the symptoms?

Fred Varcoe wrote about putting greens on Japanese golf courses in the August 2016 issue of Euro Biz Japan. The article, [Know your greens (pdf, 3 MB)][1], includes some quotes from me about bentgrass, korai, and how balls roll on putting greens.

I made [a Shiny app with climatological normals data][1] from the Japan Meteorological Agency to show the combination of sunshine and temperature at 11 locations. [@naturalgolf_D asked][2] “What kind of situation is Japan?

On 17 July 2016, I was in the Tokyo area with Jim Brosnan. The daily light integral (DLI) in Tokyo that day was 14.2 mol/m2. Jim asked me if it was exceptionally cloudy that day.

I’ve been writing a monthly article for ゴルフ場セミナー (Golf Course Seminar) magazine since May 2008. That’s 99 articles so far, and 118,518 words. The best of these will be published in English, sometime; for now they are only available in Japanese.

This chart ( download at full size ) shows the average photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) for each hour of 2015 at Tokyo. The daily light integral (DLI) is the number written in black at the top right corner of each facet in this chart.

I made a map of all the flights I took in 2015.1 After seeing the map, I scrolled through my photos from these places. It was an extraordinary year for studying grass around the world.