I spoke at the Sustainable Turfgrass Management in Asia 2016 conference about light at different locations. The presentations slides can be viewed here, or embedded below. For more about the conference, which saw 278 delegates from 24 countries and 5 continents travel to Pattaya this year, see this post at the Asian Turf Seminar site.

Light is important. Without enough light, grass won't grow well. I suggested that "no-problem" daily light integral (DLI) values for putting greens of bermudagrass, seashore paspalum, and zoysiagrass, may be about 40, 30, and 20 respectively. And I showed what PAR is, and how PAR is measured in one second as the photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD), and then how all the PPFD over the course of a day are added together to make up the DLI.

I showed charts for one day, and also animated charts that show PPFD and DLI for every day of the year. This chart shows the maximum expected PPFD by time of day, and maximum possible DLI by day of the year, at Tokyo and Bangkok if there were no clouds. You may need to click the browser's "refresh" button to play these animations.

I wanted to visualize how these maximum possible values, on days when the sky is clear and about 75% of the extraterrestrial radiation reaches the earth's surface. To do that, I looked up the global solar radiation for Tokyo for every hour of 2015, converted those values to PAR units, and plotted them together with the maximum possible values assuming 75% transmittance of extraterrestrial radiation. That is plotted here.

I also explained that the global solar radiation has a large influence on the evapotranspiration (ET). I demonstrated this ET calculator that uses the Hargreaves equation to estimate the ET based on global solar radiation.