Saturday, May 28, 2011

White and Green Post


Last month I talked about the weather and I am going to talk about the weather again this month. It rained just about every day in May making conditions not very good for golf cart travel. Carts continued to be restricted to paths more than they ever have and we also started using white and green stakes to help protect wet areas from damage. You can see from the picture below that we are placing the stakes in a circular pattern without rope and we would like the carts to stay out of that area. This system has been working very well and it has helped to protect our course from unnecessary damage.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Lightning

Hello, sorry that I have not kept up with this as much as I should. I will try harder to get it done. Last Friday during the Mini Invitational (5/13/11) our course took a direct lightning strike on 1 blue fairway near the new bunker on the right. You can see from the pictures below that it blew several holes into the ground that are 3 foot deep that happen to be right on top of a bundle of irrigation wires controlling the irrigation heads on that hole. You can see in the second photo that the grass is dying in the typical lightning pattern as it branches out from the central strike point.



















































So I think now is a good time to review our lightning warning system. We use one of the best systems available and it is extremely accurate. It has not given us a false alarm since it was installed two years ago, unlike the old system that sounded false alarms on a regular basis. Our system is set to the national standard 10 mile radius from our location, meaning if we have one strike within 10 miles from us the alarms will sound. The all clear siren will go off after 20 minutes of the last strike within the 10 mile radius. I see several members disregard the sirens and continue play taking a huge risk even though having been warned. Below is some information about the company that we utilize for our lightning protection system.











Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. (WDT) Receives AMS Award

By : Matthew Piette, Chief Marketing Officer


Posted January 24, 2011 06:19 to News Seattle, WA, January 24th, 2011



– Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. (WDT) has been awarded the American Meteorological Society Award for Outstanding Services to Meteorology by a Corporation. The citation from the Council of the AMS commends WDT “for ten years of exceptional service in transferring innovative science and technologies from research and development to customer-focused operational meteorological products and services.”


The formal presentation of the WDT award will be made at the Annual Awards Banquet to be held on January 26th, 2011, at the Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, during the 91st Annual Meeting of the AMS.


“We are delighted to be the recipient of this prestigious award,” said Mike Eilts, President and CEO of WDT. “Over the past ten years, our expert staff of meteorologists have focused on providing state-of-the-science weather detection, nowcasting, and forecasting systems for global deployment in operational environments,” said Eilts. “More recently, we have extended our offerings to provide critical Weather as a Service™ (WaaS) turnkey software solutions, providing dynamic interactive, mobile weather, alerting, and mapping applications for the world's leading local media and Internet companies. “

WDT is a leader in providing value-added weather content, geo-mapping solutions and mobile alerting applications to their customers. The company counts as clients most of the United States' leading weather services and interactive media outlets, as well as governmental, industrial and military weather customers from all over the world. Founded in 2000, WDT has been awarded Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 status five times after experiencing 80 percent annual growth during its first four years and continued rapid growth in the past few years.


WDT has its roots in transferring technology from Federal and University Meteorological Research Organizations and operationalizing that technology to provide value-added content to its partners. As an example, WDT has licensed state-of-the-science technologies from the National Severe Storms Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Laboratories, the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, the University of Oklahoma and McGill University, among others, to provide superior weather prediction capabilities to companies with weather sensitive end consumers.