Will It Ever Warm Up?

This winter is officially ranked as the 7th coldest winter in the past 100 years for Cleveland.  Of course this had to come the year we decided to begin hosting the Cleveland Open, open the new clubhouse, and my first official year as Head Superintendent of LCC.  I certainly don't like breaking bad news to anyone, but I do feel I need to communicate to the membership of LCC what should be expected as the season gets closer.  In my previous post, I put up some photos of plugs taken from 3 different fairways on the course.  The worst being from 11 fairway mound.  That plug recovered well after being in our warm shop for 2 weeks.  I did the same thing with some plugs from greens I was concerned with, and results were not as good.  The difference being our fairways are nearly pure bentgrass, and our greens nearly all Poa annua.  I will post photos below of turf from our 14th green and the 16th green.  As the first "polar vortex" hit, a handful of our greens had some amount of exposed turf.  Exposed Poa to -12 not including windchill is a bad combination, and the turf has encountered these conditions multiple times this winter.

16 Green

 Being exposed to the north, 16 green had the most exposure to the elements this winter.  This plug has been in our shop for 2 weeks.  You can see how the Bentgrass recovered (the small patch of green turf), while the Poa did not.  There are however lots of Poa seeds germinating throughout this plug.

14 Green

This plug from 14 green was under snow cover all winter.  Snow forms a great natural insulation for the turf.   The link below is a good article posted by the USGA.
http://www.usga.org/course_care/regional_updates/regional_reports/northcentral/Don%E2%80%99t-Over-React-%E2%80%93-Time-To-Consider-All-Options---February-2014/

Just to give you a visual idea of this winters extreme temperatures, I posted some graphs below that show December, January, and February's temps.

December

January

February

 Our weather station data shows that the average temperature for both January and February was 13 degrees.  With temperatures reaching -12 in both months.  It has to be coming to an end here soon