In late October, about three months before the start of the Farmers Insurance Open, Paul Cushing already had a tournament favorite: El Nino.
Cushing, the assistant deputy director for the City of San Diego’s golf courses, has effectively doubled down on El Nino by buying extra pumps and other equipment to handle a deluge that could come with the extreme weather predicted this winter for the Southland. A hurricane in Mexico the prior week and a warm ocean and late summer heat and humidity further convinced Cushing of the wet forecast.
“At this point, I’d be much more surprised if we don’t have a significant rain event than if we do,” Cushing said of tournament week (Jan. 25-31) at Torrey Pines.
Raining on the Tour’s annual Southland parade would put a damper on the West Coast Swing but be welcome news to the rest of the region’s golf course community as long as flooding and mudslides don’t coincide. Four years of drought have drained the reserves of the state and pushed courses to their liquid limit through water restrictions. The latest data, Cushing said, showed the state needing 75 inches of rain to recover.
“We’re not going to get that all back in one swoop,” he said, “but we could put a pretty good dent it; maybe at least get us through another year or two by restoring some of the ground reserves.”
Mike Huck, a water management consultant in San Juan Capistrano who monitors usage by state courses, said California tracks caught a break in 2015 between timely rains and late-arriving heat. Despite mandated water restrictions, courses kept their conditions up and in some cases saved more water than the mandate.
“The rainfall came with perfect timing,” Huck said. “Some courses had just started to go yellow after the cuts and it’s like they were given a breath of fresh air. Some courses you couldn’t even tell where the water had been shut off. “I had one (Orange County) super tell me, ‘We’re as green as we’ve ever been.’”
But most superintendents are ready for nature to open the hose, and past experiences and current conditions lead Huck to believe that relief is coming. His concern, though, is how it comes.
“These storms can be really intense,” he said. “If that’s the case, we won’t capture as much as if it was a nice slow rain that drizzled for 10 days.”
Like Cushing, Huck thinks a best-case scenario buys courses a couple years of supply and could result in the lifting of water restrictions that will be re-evaluated in 2016. Or water boards could look at how courses got by on less this year and stay conservative.
“It all depends on capture,” Huck said. “In the spring they could say we’re comfortable with where we’re at, or they could press on restricting consumption.”
Huck said 2015 proved to be a huge learning year about conservation and resources for those in charge of course maintenance.
“It’s just like when we had the big drought in the late ’70s,” he said. “It really opened people’s eyes and made them take a different course and use less water. They realized you can maintain good course conditions with a lot less water.”
Huck is betting on coastal Southern California seeing significant relief but isn’t sure about the northern and inland parts of the state.
“What’s the snowpack is the big question,” he said, referring to the past two years as the lowest in recorded state history. “Will the cold air mass come down to the Sierras or will it go to the Rockies? The experts seem split 50-50 about whether there will be a big snow event in the Sierras.”
Both ranges contribute to California’s supply, with snowmelt holding the potential for a more lasting impact than the storms themselves. A worst-case scenario for courses in 2016, Huck said, is a winter that under delivers on El Nino’s potential.
“It could mean no water at all for some courses,” he said, “or just water for tees and a small percentage of greens.”
Art Miller, a 30-year research oceanographer in Climate Sciences at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, said unprecedented ocean climate conditions make an extreme event more likely.
“The northern Pacific Ocean has (abnormally) warm ocean temperatures all the way up to Alaska,” he said. “Once it gets set up like that, it takes a long time to fade away.”
Miller said some models show it could take ocean temperatures as long as six months to normalize, which provides a longer window of opportunity for rain or severe weather beyond December to February, viewed as the peak window for El Nino.
During the El Nino of 2005, Cushing was helping with work at Vellano Country Club in Chino Hills but the rains made the project impossible until spring.
“We’d work and then get 10 inches of rain that would wash out the entire project,” he said. “We’d pick up the pieces and it would happen again. And we were a course with 600 feet of elevation change. Water was pooled everywhere.”
That El Nino brought 44 inches of rain to the region. A similar soaking wouldn’t overflow reservoirs but would fill up bunkers. Of his 2005 experience, Cushing said: “I think we’re in for that again.”
