When GP doesn't tell the full story

I received an interesting inquiry from PACE Turf member Mark Hooker, the Director of Agronomy at Royal Auckland and Grange Golf Club (RAGGC) in New Zealand. He asked if I could check temperatures and GP at Auckland and at the Melbourne Sandbelt, with a specific interest in how those temperatures might be related to bermudagrass (or green couch, as Cynodon dactylon is called) performance.

I looked up the hourly weather data for the past three years for the locations of…