With just one hurricane making landfall last year, 2023 was the quietest tropical storm season in the continental United States since 2015 thanks to a season dominated by El Niño weather patterns.
By many accounts, 2024 promises to be a much more active tropical season.
In a new feature on TurfNet, Herb Stevens and Garrett Bastardi of T3Golf will provide periodic updates, warnings and critical information for golf course superintendents about potential weather events that could affect the day-to-day business of maintaining a golf course. The announcement was made during a recent TurfNet University Webinar on long-range forecasting for the remainder of the spring through summer.
"Both Garrett and I believe that all the pieces are in place for a very active tropical season, and that would impact Florida, the Gulf Coast all the way over to Texas, and in this case we think the entire East Coast of the United States from Florida all the way to Maine will need to pay attention during the tropical season," Stevens said.
During the course of the summer and on into autumn, Garrett and I are going to be providing some early heads up, hopefully, on significant weather events that can affect people anywhere in the country that are taking care of fine turfgrass."
Stevens is a former TV meteorologist and one of the original on-air personalities when The Weather Channel debuted in 1982. He has been providing weather reports to the skiing and golf turf industries for more than 20 years with Grass Roots Weather. In 2021, Stevens and fellow meteorologist Garrett Bastardi launched T3 Golf which provides golf course superintendents with short-term forecasts at an uber local level.
Their updates would reflect any potential major weather threat. The unpredictable nature of such calamities lends to the potentially irregular schedule of the updates.
"If there's a potential tornado outbreak, if there's potential for a hurricane landfall, we're pretty good at spotting those things with a pretty good amount of lead time," Stevens said.
"Anything like that pops up, and we think it would impact golf courses, and that's our primary concern, we will be writing up a summary of the nature of the threat, and it will be posted on TurfNet."
Hurricane Idalia was the only hurricane to strike the U.S. when it made landfall in the Florida Panhandle on Aug. 30.
The hurricane season runs June 1 through Nov. 30.