Weather station

The weather drives nearly every decision we make. Do we mow or roll greens? Or both? Or neither? Can we mow fairways? Or are they too wet? Or do we have to mow them today before they get too wet? Do we need to make a chemical application before a storm? All of these questions and more are determined or guided by the weather. Recently, we upgraded the weather station at the Grounds department facility to help us with some of these questions.

We check the weather multiple times a day. Here are a couple of past posts, one about dry weather, another about wet weather, and a third about cold weather and how these conditions affect the course. We use several online resources, including weather.gov, weather.com, and others. We also subscribe to a weather service that gives us twice weekly video reports plus any alerts for hazardous conditions. Each of these adds a piece of information to the puzzle, yet none of them is on site; we use them to compare and contrast to one another to come up with a general idea for the weather at Bretton Woods. But, we also use our on-site weather station to complement the other sources as well.

Digital display in the office

Our new weather station is an AcuRite brand wireless station. It detects all of the basic weather variables like temperature, humidity, wind, and rain, along with a list of other useful information that it provides. It comes with a color, digital display for the details, which sits in the office. Again, we add this to all of the other information what we gather to make our decisions. One of the coolest upgrades that our new weather station provides, is its ability to be linked online. We can check the current weather at BWRC from any computer, tablet, or smartphone. Computers and tablets link online through an AcuRite supported site to which our weather uploads. For the smartphone, AcuRite has a free app that we have downloaded. Once we sync the app to our specific weather station, we can check the weather on our phone from anywhere. Lastly, online and through the app, we can set alarms when certain conditions are met. For example, we can set an alarm for a pre-determined amount of rain and, once we receive that amount, the system automatically emails or texts whomever we have set as the recipient.

With this information we can make a quicker judgement about all of our agronomic decisions. If we received a large amount of rain, we can plan accordingly. Perhaps the amount of rain has made it too wet to mow; knowing this information sooner may allow us to alert our staff and have fewer employees come to work and save the hours for a drier day. It can also aid in communicating to the membership regarding course conditions. Using the same rainstorm example, knowing sooner allows us to update the website and Pro Staff that we are likely cart path only, or vice versa, determining that we dodged a storm even though they were very nearby.

Very rarely is too much information a bad thing. In our case, having weather details from many places helps us to fill in the blanks regarding what is happening at Bretton Woods and how best to react. We can’t predict the weather yet, but our new weather station should help us monitor it better.

Etiquette Reminder of the Month

Please rake your entire disturbance within the bunker, including all of your footprints, not just the area from where you hit.

See you on the course!

Joe

jvillegas@bwrc.org