Another Atmospheric River

 All of us in the golf world, both players and operators watch weather fairly closely as the sport we all are a part of is played outdoors and thus impacted by weather. As such, I'm sure for most of you it comes as no surprise  that we are in for another Atmospheric River starting Wednesday 11/20/24. Dr. Daniel Swain, a weather forecaster from UCLA states.....

"The upcoming atmospheric river event will be a very long duration event for portions of Northern California north of the SF Bay Area... This combination of long duration and strong intensity will yield an overall rain event that will be, in many ways, more impressive than the sum of it's parts." (Weather West - November 18 2024)

Radar imagery from the Weather Channel 11/20/24 12:00 PM.

10 day forecast from Wednesday 11/20/24

What Does This Mean for The Golf Course?

Of course it means the golf course will be wet and we will be cart path only until the course dry's out. Additionally we will potentially need to call for some F9 & B9 alternating closures as the course dry's out to make pigment applications to our hybrid bermuda fairways to help them with winter color. These scheduled applications cannot be done in the rain or when it is too wet to get application equipment onto the course without causing damage and to  it needs to dry before golf activity. 

What Have We Done to Prepare for this Storm? 

We were mowing rough today right up to the start of rainfall. Additionally we make sure all of our drainage inlets are trimmed and clean to facilitate quick movement of rain water off of the golf course. We also made a big push to finish the entrance way landscaping and irrigation work that we were in process  with as  this type of rainfall will make open ground a real mess and delay progress once the storms subside. Below are some pictures of this progress. 

Finishing up second pass on rough mowing this week on Wednesday 11/20/24 just as the rain started falling

We also finished new planting on the  parking lot mound in the entrance way ahead of the storm on Wednesday 11/20/24. 

We also added plants to the left hand bank as you enter the club. We completed renewing the irrigation of this area two weeks back. 

The renewing of the irrigation on this parking lot bank was just getting started on Monday 11/18/24. We of course were looking at the forecast and pushing to get the work completed prior to the storms so we could plant and bark which is precisely what we did. It literally started raining on us when we were raking out the last of the bark. 

11/22/24 postscript. The atmospheric river is not hitting the golf course with the originally forecasted intensity. Through Friday 11/22/24 mid morning we have had just over 1" of measured rain. The jet stream seems to be skirting us and even producing some great photo op's for Kubota.