MOTD: CA Exceptional Drought and Location of Golf Courses

It’s tough watching loved ones suffer. If golf is your game and your favorite course is in drought-stricken California, odds are you’ve seen verdant fairways turn ochre and watched balls skid across rock hard greens.

According to CBS.com, “There are 866 golf courses in California. An average 18-hole course uses 90 million gallons of water each year. That’s enough to fill 136 Olympic-sized swimming pools.” With the current drought conditions, many courses have chosen to stop watering.

We pulled data available from the US Drought Monitor maintained by the National Drought Mitigation Center displaying the percentage of area in each CA county currently experiencing D4 or exceptional drought conditions. The USDM guidelines for D4 conditions list the following impacts:

Exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses
Shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies

We then searched for and found a list of golf courses in California with latitude and longitude coordinates. We found the list on POI-Factory.com, a site with a database of “new and interesting places for your GPS” submitted by users. We sorted these by type: municipal, public, private and semi-private. The total number of courses in the POI-Factory.com dataset differs from the CBS.com accounting: 942 to 866. We cannot independently verify the accuracy of these listings.

We then imported both datasets into FactLook to create the following visualizations.

1. This first map displays the D4 conditions in each California county.