The Pellucid Perspective - March 2022 - 8

COURSE
OPERATIONS
Click here for enlarged version of chart above.
the '22 season opening.
I'll first apologize that the Foresight table below is going to be
hard to read because it's very wide in tracking even just an excerpt
of the 60 day future (I've truncated it to make it semi-legible; if
you're interested in an .xls sample email me and I'll send you one;
not yours...); besides if you can't read it then you're going to have
to pay closer attention to my narrative:
Let's break down what it's telling us:
* The forecast CR for the current year, top line in fuchsia;
my read:
o Although we see a couple of days with non-zero
numbers in late March and first half April, there
isn't the consistent streak which signals " season
open " until we get to the right of the chart which
is mid-April
o Compared to last year's CR pattern (3rd row,
light pink) we started seeing consistency all the
way to the left of the chart (20 Mar) with one
dead spell the last week in that month
o Compared to the 30-yr average, the trend looks
like we start seeing consistency right around
1 April which, from a 30 year resident here,
is about right. Anything before 4/1 is gravy,
anything tax day or later is a delay. '22 is looking
like a tax day year vs. '21 which was a gravy year
* The middle section (red and blue lines) give us the forecast
highs and lows which are one of multiple variables
that we use in our Capacity Rounds which we developed
and have refined over the years with our weather expert
partners. While we don't want to give away our secrets,
generally golf in Chicago starts to " bud " when it's over
50 but we do have that inconvenient factor of wind chill
and wind speed which will eliminate hours/days that
appear perfectly fine on just max/min temps. The other
factor at play is when in the day those max/mins are
forecast to occur and how long we'll stay there (if you
don't like the weather in Chicago, just wait a few hours,
8 The Pellucid PersPecTive
it'll change)
*
The bottom section in green outlines the forecast precipitation
and you'll see a number of days where the CR
= 0 and we'll see in the forecast precip that it's anywhere
from 0.2 inches up to an inch plus, all of which put a
damper on golfer's interest. To Stuart's point though,
golfers in most northern climes are much more likely
to brave marginal conditions in the Spring than in the
Fall (the world-famous Lindsay theory, " golfers are more
like bears that squirrels " ). You haven't lived until you've
slogged through 18 holes in a mist at 40 degrees but
most of us didn't relish it enough to repeat it
* At the bottom is the more visual representation of what
the overall trend is going to be for forecast CR (solid
red line) compared to last year (broken red line) and,
for those interested, we tossed in the comparative 30-yr
average timeseries line (blue). The net interpretation
is that we're going to get a later start and be below last
year's pace through the end of April but we'll be slightly
ahead of a " normal " year
We've had people say, " I can just go get the weather forecast
variables in the public domain and put them in a spreadsheet
(some number of them do), why should I do this? " My response
is that you still have to figure out how to translate all those numbers
into some metric (Capacity Rounds) and you also have to
maintain last year's history for comparison and you don't stand a
chance of collecting and maintaining that for a 10+ year Norm.
Other than that, knock yourself out. The cherry on top is that
Foresight is updated daily, delivered via a web portal (so you can
access anywhere you're on the web) and can be exported to Excel
for those " data jocks " like Stuart and me who inevitably want to
put it in different form, do some calculations or compare it to
some other information that we've also been able to export to
Excel as our common collection point.
Back to a more macro view, we've looked at a couple dozen of
these as a representative sample and the general drift is that the
season will open later for many northern markets but then the
March 2022
https://www.pellucidcorp.com/kpwk
The Pellucid Perspective - March 2022

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