Pellucid studies the weather

Pellucid Corp. continues its crusade to quantify and understand weather’s impact on rounds demand. With almost two years experience in tracking weather across micro (individual courses) to macro (total United States) geographies, Pellucid is helping owner/operators and lenders more accurately track a facility’s performance in generating weather-neutral rounds.

Their newest application, the Regional Weather Impact Tracking Report, provides the monthly and year-to-date variance in golf playable hours for the total United States as well as 24 Pellucid-defined weather regions. President Jim Koppenhaver summarizes the wild and arduous journey to Pellucid’s exclusive ability in the industry to track weather’s impact on playable hours and capacity rounds, “We’ve heard the industry’s mantra for years that all golf is local and so it was only logical that we initially build the weather impact analysis at individual facility level. Extending the weather tracking to regions and the total United States was the logical extension of this capability to give industry stakeholders a view of the net effect of weather in the current year in addition to the performance of key regions defined by similar weather influences.” 

The regional weather impact tracking report provides monthly updates to clients answering the following key questions:
1. What was the net effect of weather at the national level for the current month and year-to-date?
2. How do reported rounds changes at the national level compare to weather variance?
3. Which weather-defined regions are having playable hours favorability/unfavorability this year and how big are the changes versus year-ago?

To create this capability, Pellucid had to overcome several small challenges. The first was how to divide the United States into regions whose weather patterns are similar requiring incorporating maritime, latitude and mountain influences. Secondarily, the weather variance had to be weighted by the rounds demand importance of those regions (i.e. losing 10 percent of playable hours in the Gulf Coast region does not carry the rounds impact nationally vs. losing 10 percent of playable hours in the Western Great Lakes region during the month of August.

Pellucid will be providing more details on how they overcame these challenges in the next issue of Outside the Ropes. Interested parties can register at Pellucid’s Web site (www.pellucidcorp.com) to receive the executive summary issue at no charge or to subscribe to the newsletter for the full report and the actual numbers for the first half of 2005. For more specific information on this new monthly tracking report and to receive a mock-up sample, interested parties should contact Jim Koppenhaver at jimk@pellucidcorp.com.