weather

This note below, about the temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP), has been sitting in my blog_posts.org1 file for a while now, as one of those topics to write about sometime. When I read the note I jotted down when I created this entry, I realized I wouldn’t have to do much to turn this into a blog post.

I’ll start with a tautology. Warm-season grass species grow, and are used as turfgrasses, in locations with warm temperatures. Where it gets interesting is the interaction of light—specifically the photosynthetically active radiation (PAR)—with temperature, and with water supply or drought stress.

On a recent trip to southern Europe, I was walking on a fairway and looking down at the grass. I’d seen some bermudagrass (Cynodon) fairways and did not notice any dollar spot.

A previous post showed photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) data in units of daily totals—the daily light integral (DLI). That post included a chart with a locally smoothed regression line through it.

I’ve been using the NASA POWER agroclimatology data for a few projects. I get the data using the convenient nasapower R package by Adam Sparks. There is also a web-based map data access viewer.

The median blog post on this site in 2019 got 244 views. And there were a few up around 1,000 to 2,000 views. There were these top 10 that everyone read.

I’ve been at Keya Golf Club for the KBC Augusta tournament this week. Yesterday afternoon I watched some shots during the first practice round, and took a few videos of ball reaction on the greens.

Regular readers of this blog will be familar with some previous attempts to estimate the N mineralization in turfgrass soils. There was this from 2010, which I wrote about in 2015 saying “I wouldn’t explain it this way again.

Yesterday I saw some dollar spot on a korai (Zoysia matrella) fairway in Kyushu, Japan. I wondered what the Smith-Kerns model probability for dollar spot had been. So I looked up the recent temperature and humidity at a nearby weather station.

I’ve written about reactive greenkeeping being at least a viable option, and have implied that it is preferable to proactive greenkeeping. With a little effort, one can get information (data) about the weather, the amount of water in the soil, the quantity of nutrients in the soil and the quantity of nutrients used by the grass, the growth rate of the grass, and so on.