Viridescent - the Asian Turfgrass Center blog

List of Climate Charts: China, India, Japan, and Global

I've made many climate charts this year, from the static ones that can be downloaded and printed, to the interactive ones that can be viewed and modified in a web browser. This is a list of all the charts that are available, starting with the interactive ones that show the changes in normal temperature, rainfall, and sunshine hours through the year.

Climatological normals for 50 world cities

Climatological normals for 46 world cities

Climatological normals for major Chinese cities, in English

Climatological normals for major Chinese cities, in Chinese

Climatological normals for major Indian and surrounding cities, in English

Climatological normals for major Indian and surrounding cities, in Hindi

Climatological normals for major Japanese cities, in Japanese

Climatological normals for major Japanese cities plus Atlanta and Bangkok, in Japanese

Climatological normals for Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kolkata, Miami, and Tokyo

I have also made a series of static charts that can be viewed online or downloaded and printed. These charts are from the dataset with climatological normals for 46 world cities.

The static charts were made using the ggplot2 package in R. The interactive motion charts were made using the googleVis package in R.

Eight New GC Seminar Articles Available for Download

I've uploaded eight articles to complete year three of the series I write about turfgrass science for Golf Course Seminar (ゴルフ場セミナー) magazine. There are now 36 articles from this series available for download.

マイカの時間 1 (Micah's Time, Part 1)

マイカの時間 2 (Micah's Time, Part 2)

マイカの時間 3 (Micah's Time, Part 3)

What are these articles all about? The eight articles just uploaded deal with reducing stress on the grass and developing a system of golf course maintenance based on controlling the growth rate of the grass.

The figure at right, from the October 2010 issue, shows the growth response of creeping bentgrass to increased nitrogen application, based on research by Kussow and Houlihan at the University of Wisconsin, and demonstrates that creeping bentgrass growth is perpetually limited by nitrogen application rate.

These articles also discuss how to evaluate the seasonal growing patterns and stress periods based on the growth potential model of Drs. Gelernter and Stowell of PACE Turf. The figure at right is from the November 2010 issue and shows the calculated growth potential for Tokyo based on average monthly weather data.

These articles are translated expertly by Mr. Yukio Ueno, and they are read by greenkeepers and course maintenance workers all over Japan. I'm writing the fourth series now, which is focusing on international case studies that will be of interest to Japanese greenkeepers.

Ten Years Ago on a Golf Course in Japan: part 3

If you've flown into Narita Airport in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo, and have happened to look out the window, you may have been surprised when you flew over golf course after golf course as the plane descended. Chiba prefecture has more than 150 golf courses, placing it third among Japanese prefectures in golf course count. Only massive Hokkaido in the north, and Hyogo prefecture near Osaka, have more courses.

This map shows a portion of Chiba prefecture where there is an especially high concentration of golf courses. The satellite image was taken in the winter, so we see that the korai (Zoysia matrella) fairways and noshiba (Zoysia japonica) roughs are dormant.

View Larger Map

Many of the golf courses at Chiba were constructed in the golf course building boom of the early 1990's, and for these courses, there is a pesticide ban. I was a superintendent in 2000 and 2001 at Habu CC, which opened in 1996 and was thus subject to the pesticide ban. Here the inspection team from the prefectural government made a visit to inspect the course, the maintenance building, and our records. We could use wetting agents, Polyoxin-D, and phosphites; other than that there was very little in the way of chemical control products that we could use. 

One thing that I focused on, with the limited resources we had to maintain the course, was to have the central playing corridors in as good a condition as possible. We tried to have perfect greens, tees and fairways as good as they could be, and less attention was paid to the roughs, particularly in out-of-play areas. You can see here, in a view from behind the 14^th hole at Habu CC, that there are some weeds growing behind the green on this par 5.

I've sometimes had long discussions with Japanese greenkeepers about the philosphy of balance in golf course maintenance. If resources for maintenance are limiting, I've always strived to make green perfect and the playing corridors as good as possible. In Japan, there has historically been the idea that there should be balance on a course, and that all of the areas should be maintained. 

Balance is alright if you have enough resources to maintain every square meter at a high level, but if those resources are not there, then striving for balance is a sure way to have mediocre conditions all over the course. I think every course has the resources to make their greens perfect, and I am fine to let some out-of-play areas be a little less-maintained if I can ensure the greens will be excellent. This is still a challenge in Japan, because many courses were built in mountainous areas in a bubble economy and are inherently expensive to maintain. Maintenance budgets then get cut again and again, and it is very difficult to maintain these courses with the desired balance. I was lucky in my work, to be a foreigner, and to have an American boss. In this situation it was easier, culturally, to focus our maintenance efforts on the playing corridors.

Ten Years Ago on a Golf Course in Japan: part 2

I was the golf course superintendent at Habu CC in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo from September 2000 to August 2001. Ten years later, I'm spending this summer at Japan, partly to study and collect data about turfgrass performance, but also to remember what it is like to be a superintendent. Now halfway through my time at Japan this summer, I've come up with a list of three reasons why it is especially difficult to be a golf course superintendent here.

1. During July and August it is too hot for creeping bentgrass to grow well. This afternoon on a golf course at Chiba, the soil temperatures of a Penncross creeping bentgrass green were 36.3° at 2.5 cm, 34.8° at 5 cm, and 32.4° at 10 cm. Since July 1, I've yet to record a soil temperature on a creeping bentgrass green at less than 23.4°. In August, it is hotter on average at Osaka than it is at Atlanta, Miami, and Singapore. Tokyo is also hot and humid, averaging 31.1° for a high each day in August, with a relative humidity of 71%. That makes for a heat index in the shade of 37.6° C (99.7° F) on average every day in August.

2. So with such hot temperatures, we would need to have good irrigation systems, right? But golf courses in Japan have irrigation systems that are inadequate for the needs of the grass. There are essentially no quick couplers, so hand-watering, if done at all, is usually done by applying water from portable 1000 L tanks. This is not very effective but when there are no quick couplers, one doesn't have many other options. Most courses don't have fairway irrigation at all, and even the courses with the best irrigation systems are likely to have just a single-row system. Supplying water to the grass during the summer is one of the most difficult tasks to manage for golf course superintendents in Japan. 

3. The hot summer months when the bentgrass struggles to survive and when irrigation water is applied however it can be are also the times when the Zoysia matrella (korai) fairways and Zoysia japonica (noshiba) roughs are growing at their fastest rate, requiring more frequent mowing. With the need for handwatering and also the need for more frequent mowing during the summers, it is especially challenging then, at Japan, to have relatively small crew sizes. Most courses have only ten to fifteeen people working on course maintenance. It is a real struggle to complete all the necessary work.

I remember dealing with all of these challenges when I worked at Habu CC ten years ago. After visiting so many golf courses this summer, I see these same three challenges for golf course superintendents still exisit. During the turf science seminars I give in the winter, the most popular topics include management of soil moisture, managing creeping bentgrass during the summer, and management of ultradwarf bermudagrass. Each of those topics is in some way related to the three points identified above as the reason why Japan is one of the most difficult places to be a golf course superintendent.

Motion Chart of Japan Climate Normals from 1981 to 2010

I've made an interactive chart for major Japanese cities using climatological normals data from the Japan Meteorological Agency.

For a chart of global cities, in English, click here.

Ten Years Ago on a Golf Course in Japan: part 1

I was a golf course superintendent in Japan from September 2000 until August 2001. Now, ten years later, it is interesting to see some of the photos from that year and to remember what it was like. We were working with a maintenance crew of about sixteen people in July of 2001, and I think five people on the crew went on to be golf course superintendents themselves; two interns from the United States, and three of the Japanese crew. 

We had a great team. July 22 was a Sunday that year, and on Japanese courses then, it was not typical to have much afternoon or "twilight" play. Golf tended to be (and generally still is) a structured event, so tee times (Japanese courses usually do a two tee start, off #1 and #10) would generally be booked a few weeks in advance, with the last tee times usually set at midday. Even on a busy day, after 14:00 or so the course would begin to clear as the last golfers played their final nine holes. 

We were able to get a lot of work done on these afternoons. Soil tests of the fairways showed that the soils were low in magnesium and potassium. We were able to find sul-po-mag (0-0-22) from a Japanese agricultural supply company and apply it to fairways to increase the potassium and magnesium availability. And we had to do a lot of work to manage soil compaction, improve water infiltration, and stimulate growth on the bermudagrass fairways. At the time Habu CC was one of the few courses in Japan that used two passenger carts, and at which the carts were allowed to be driven on the fairways. We were doing about 4,000 rounds per month, all with carts driving onto narrow fairways of this course in the mountains of Chiba. So ten years ago today, we waited until the last golfers had moved off these holes and then worked until the sun went down.

The Two Green System

Yesterday I visited four eighteen hole golf courses around the Tokyo area. That is 72 holes of golf. But those 72 holes had 126 creeping bentgrass greens. How is that? One of the courses had one bentgrass green per hole, and three of the courses used the two green system and had two greens per hole. 

Putting greens are the most intensively managed area of any golf course. At Japan, where so many courses use the two green system, golf course maintenance becomes even more complicated because of having to manage twice the number of greens. There is some advantage in having two greens per hole in that ideally one green can always be kept in perfect condition for play while maintenance is performed on the closed green. When I was a greenkeeper at Japan ten years ago, I was fortunate to work at a course with one green, and from speaking with greenkeepers here there is a general consensus that a one green system is easier to work with. 

I would have to agree. Although at times it would be good to give the main green a bit of a rest, overall it is rather complicated to manage two greens on one hole. In almost all cases there would be no quick couplers at either green for handwatering. I know from experience how difficult it is to manage bentgrass greens at Japan in the summer without quick couplers. The soil conditions are usually different from the set of main greens to the sub-greens. Sometimes the grass species are different, for example with creeping bentgrass on one green and Zoysia matrella on the other. But it most cases there would be two different varieties of creeping bentgrass on the two greens. And then there are all the covers that, during the winter, need to be put on the greens every afternoon and taken off again every morning. And all this work is done with a maintenance crew that averages just over ten people. Japan is certainly among the most difficult places to be a greenkeeper.

A Plot of Cities Where Warm-season Grasses Grow, and more

I made the bubble plot above to see how the differences in temperature and sunlight and rainfall between cities would appear if plotted this way. The data are from climatological normals provided by national meteorological services and the World Meteorological Organization, collected in some cases from the climate section of a city's page on Wikipedia.

I made this plot for a few reasons. I saw a job posting for a superintendent position in Asia saying that experience working in a Florida-type climate would be desired, and I wanted to plot a few cities this way to see how cities in Asia compared with Florida. Someone also asked me if I thought it was more difficult to manage warm-season grasses in Singapore or in Florida, and I thought that a plot such as this might make my answer more clear. And I also notice as I travel that a grass that grows so well in Honolulu, for example, may not grow well at all in Bangkok. There are clear differences in suitability of grasses for different growing environments. And as I work with some new software, I saw a tutorial to make this type of bubble plot on the FlowingData website and I wanted to try it for myself.

When plotted this way with mean annual temperature on one axis and hours of sunshine on another axis (the area of the circle for each city is proportional to annual rainfall), one can see that the cities in Asia tend to have a higher annual temperature, have less annual sunshine than the cities plotted from the USA, and have substantially more precipitation. A quick look at the bubble plot shows that Singapore, for example, has about 60% the sunshine of Miami while receiving almost twice the rainfall. 

This doesn't tell the whole story about which grasses perform best in a certain area. We can also consider the winter temperatures, the summer temperatures, the timing of rainfall and dry seasons, etc., but simply plotting by temperature and sunshine tells us a lot. 

Turfgrass managers in Southeast Asia know that zoysiagrass (Zoysia matrella) and broadleaf carpetgrass (Axonopus compressus) thrive in this climate while bermudagrass maintained as a turfgrass struggles. This type of plot helps us to understand why. At the Marukatayawan Palace in Thailand, we see that zoysia grows in the sun and broadleaf carpetgrass covers the shaded areas under the trees.

These native grasses thrive when maintained as turfgrass in this region, while grasses such as bermudagrass which have a higher light requirement cannot compete with zoysia even in full sun. Why is that? Because even in full sun, there is still relatively little sunshine in Southeast Asia compared with Florida.

Turf Science Seminar 2011 at Tokyo and Osaka

Yesterday's seminar at Osaka was last of six seminars I've done this winter in the Turf Science Seminar 2011 series (ターフ・サイエンス・セミナー2011) at Tokyo and Osaka. These intensive full day seminars covered topics such as the effect of temperature on photosynthesis and photorespiration, the role of nitrogen in controlling the growth rate of the grass, the development and application of growth potential models for turfgrass, and a review of the most interesting new turfgrass research from the past year. 

Yukio Ueno provided his usual excellent translation of the seminars, seminar workbooks, and presentation slides. The seminars were supported by Toro, Syngenta, and Simplot, allowing us to offer this educational program at a subsidized cost to the more than 240 greenkeepers who attended.

The seminar workbooks are available to download here:

• Seminar workbook 1 (December, 12月)
• Seminar workbook 2 (January, 1月)
• Seminar workbook 2 (February, 2月)

I would like to thank all the greenkeepers who took time out of their busy schedules to attend these seminars. And I look forward to more seminars next winter when we can cover more turfgrass science subjects.

January Seminars at Japan and Seminar Workbook Uploaded

I've been at Japan for two weeks this month and have given a series of seminars at Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and Hokkaido. Some of these seminars have been about why Japan is such a difficult place to grow cool-season grass. The quick explanation is because the low temperatures in the summer can exceed 27°C for more a month. I've also given some seminars about what I learned while working at the Masters Tournament, US Open, and Open Championship in 2010. And I gave two full-day seminars that discussed the effects of temperature on photosynthesis and the use of a growth potential model (生長能) based on optimum temperatures for turfgrass growth.

The seminar workbook for the January Turf Science Seminar 2011 is now posted at the Asian Turfgrass Center website and can be downloaded by clicking here or by clicking the workbook image below.