TEMPERATURE CHANGES—AND TURFGRASS


By Jerry L. Hatfield, laboratory director and supervisory plant physiologist, for the National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment


Editor’s note: Tis is the third in a four-article series on Climate Change and Turfgrass by Jerry L. Hatfield. Te first article, which appeared on pages 68-73 of the July/August 2019 issue of Turf News, provided a general overview of climate change. Te second article covered precipitation changes and appeared on pages 58-62 of the September/October issue. Te fourth article in the series will address the value of turfgrass systems in mitigating microclimates in urban areas.


What we are experiencing with the climate is often referred to as global warming because the temperatures are increasing. Every month, if you listen to synopsis of the climate in the U.S. and around the world, we set records for this month being the warmest of all previous years for that specific month. What we have to understand is the changes in temperature reflect the dynamics of the atmosphere as we increase greenhouse gases and water vapor. Tese shifts in our climate have implications for the management of turfgrass.


Figure 1. Average temperature trends across the contiguous United States in the last 30 years of observations compared to the record since 1895. Graph downloaded from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Climate at a Glance: National Time Series, published September 2019, retrieved on September 17, 2019 from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/


102 TPI Turf News November/December 2019


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