Predicting the weather with AnythingWeather.com

On Monday and Tuesday at Mission Hills CC, the wind was blowing… hard. It was giving the maintenance team fits, as they scrambled from green to green to make sure they were wet enough to endure the conditions.

Gregg Potter felt their pain, but also had good news: the wind was about to die down and better weather would arrive on Wednesday.

Potter founded AnythingWeather.com in 1999 and has been in the weather forecasting business since graduating from Kansas University with a degree in atmospheric sciences. The company primarily does business in the United States, but also has clients in India and Australia.

“We collect (weather) data, make it available to our clients, be that superintendents or Daytona International Speedway,” Potter says. “With the Speedway, it’s about safety, and if there’s lightning coming and they need to evacuate 100,000 fans, or a superintendent who wants to better understand the evapotranspiration so they know how much to water.”

Potter says superintendents understand how important something like site-specific ET rates are. But their services are a la carte — if a course just wants their lightning prediction tools, that’s fine too.

Anything Weather allows users to customize hourly or 5-day forecast data feeds for just about any location in the world.
Photo: Anythingweather.com

“We can help golf courses nationwide with a package that includes lightning alerting, to weather stations on the golf course, to forecasts that includes ET forecasts, so they can set their irrigation scheduling based on what the ET forecast is telling them in the days to follow, as opposed to looking at the last several days,” Potter says.

Potter is based in Palm Springs, Calif., and has turned heads in the area with the company’s accurate and thorough forecasts. But he wants to do more.

“Guys like David (Hay, CGCS at Mission Hills), he understands the importance of having a weather station and using the forecast to make the course better,” Potter says. “The challenge is how we can help more courses? The evapotranspiration is a key, especially out here, because water is so expensive. But what do other superintendents want?”

He hopes to find out, and hopes superintendents will reach out so he can help them with their weather forecasting.