Earlham Echo

May 23, 2023

My dad unofficially established 48 degrees as the minimum temperature that I will play golf when he mentioned many years ago that was his threshold. He never said anything about wind. At some point, overly windy conditions can ruin a game of golf and take all the fun out of it. I’m not sure when that is, but I know it when I feel it. I can only remember one time I walked off a course before I was finished because of something besides rain. A couple years ago on a blustery fall day, Kyle and I had enough of getting battered by the wind and left the course before playing a full 18 holes. We’re not wimps, but with our skin practically peeling off our faces, we didn’t feel guilty about heading for the car.

Quinn said recently that he doesn’t like to play when the wind is blowing 20 mph. That doesn’t seem realistic to me. Twenty mph isn’t great, but, in Iowa, you’d never play golf if you set that as your limit.

In the particular time slot that I was writing this, I had planned on playing golf instead. It was a sunny afternoon, the temperature was acceptable, and I didn’t have anything to do that I couldn’t put off until later. But the wind was howling. I didn’t even have to check the weather app to see how hard it was blowing—there was no way that I was playing in it. Something was rattling outside my window, and when I looked out, sure enough, a small metal frame that I had recently ‘fixed’ had blown loose again. Going onto the roof is never on my list of favorite things to do, let alone in a swirling wind storm, but I had to do it. Menacing limbs from a nearby tree shook at me while I drove a nail into the house, but I finished the job unscathed.

Being the thorough reporter and weather geek that I am, I did a little research about wind. According to one survey, Iowa is the 19^th windiest state in the country. Having endured Iowa’s worst for 35 years, I thought we’d be much higher on the list. Alaska came in as #1, and the windiest of the contiguous states is Wyoming. The states were ranked by mean wind speed for the 10% windiest areas at 328 ft above sea level and mean wind speed at 33 ft above sea level. I thought the latter was a more relevant measurement, so using that as a means of comparison, Iowa is 11 mph and Alaska is 16.3 mph. Another measurement used in the survey was mean wind power density, measured in watts per square meter, which indicates how much energy is available for conversion by a wind turbine. Alaska comes at 1,338 W/m^2 while Iowa was a mere 156 W/m^2.

Reading that, Alaska seems like a great place to generate wind power. That led me down another research rabbit hole—how does Iowa compare to Alaska in terms of the number of wind turbines? We blow them away, so to speak. Iowa, 3,400. Alaska, 100. That doesn’t make any sense to me, but one thing I learned while studying the turbine issue is that logic doesn’t really apply.

Another relevant statistic I uncovered is that Iowa has around 440 golf courses and Alaska has only 22. I suspect that discrepancy has to do with more than just wind, however. Short golf season up there.

My dad lived in Arkansas in his halcyon days of golf. Arkansas comes in at #35 on the ‘wind index,’ so he probably never worried about it much. So, on my own to come up with my golf wind threshold, I’ll just use his best practice teachings—just like on almost every other decision I’ve ever made.