climate

These are my slides for today’s presentation in the “Precision Turf and Ornamental Disease Management in the 21st Century” session at the International Congress of Plant Pathology in Boston. The abstract for my presentation is here.

A few years ago, someone contacted me about the use of zoysia in the Napa Valley. After describing places where he had seen zoysia—Austin, Tokyo—and been impressed with it, he asked what I thought about it in Napa.

This is a friendly reminder that the information here can be obtained automatically by RSS or email every time there is an update, and then can be read or deleted at one’s leisure.

I was wondering when it usually rains in Bangkok. The climatological normals for Bangkok show that there is a six month dry season from November to April, in which the average precipitation in each month is less than 100 mm (4 inches).

Yesterday I wrote that bermudagrass fairways in Thailand wouldn’t be as good as they are in the Algarve because of climate differences. The cumulative rain so far this year makes a nice illustration of this.

The turfgrass growth potential (GP) is a number that represents the proximity of the actual temperature to the optimum temperatures for growth. GP is used for a lot of things. One can use it to make estimates of nutrient use, estimates of topdressing amounts, and to find the time in autumn when the cool-season growth potential starts to exceed the warm-season growth potential.

Turfgrass growth is affected by temperature. The temperature-based turfgrass growth potential (GP) is an easy way to look at how the actual temperature is related to the optimum temperatures for growth.

I went for a run to the ocean at Cerro Gordo. As is my wont, I looked for grasses along the way. There were lots of zoysia lawns where I started.

On 17 July 2016, I was in the Tokyo area with Jim Brosnan. The daily light integral (DLI) in Tokyo that day was 14.2 mol/m2. Jim asked me if it was exceptionally cloudy that day.

I’ve shared some charts of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) as it changes through the day and through the year at different locations. For example, this is the PAR at Corvallis for each day of 2015.