Around the course: The rain on golf's parade - Brief Article

Golf Digest, Dec, 1999

Mother Nature has not been very kind to the East Coast lately. First came a scorching drought this summer, followed by a most unwelcome visitor named Floyd. The September hurricane caused flooding from parts of Florida to Connecticut and led to several dozen lives lost and any number of golf courses up to their flagsticks in brown muck.

All that comes on the heels of a study that lends credence to the weekend hacker's suspicion that Mother Nature is a golf widow. Why else would it rain more on weekends than on workdays?

In the mid-Atlantic states, it does, in fact, do just that. Randy Cervenny and Bob Balling, geographers at Arizona State University, checked precipitation figures in the region from 1979 to 1995 and concluded that 22 percent more rain falls on Saturday than on Monday (the day it rains the least). As reported in National Geographic, Cervenny suspects that pollution from daily commuter traffic builds through the workweek and brings on the weekend rain.