An Icy Situation

When 0.6" of rain falls on a foot of snow that's covering frozen ground, you get this...

The pond on hole 5 is so full that it's nearly touching the green.  Water ran from the valley below 2 and 11 tees, across the cart path, and into the pond.

Hole 7 now has a winding, frozen river down much of the fairway.

The water from 5 pond ran across the range towards holes 6 and 7 to form a very large water feature.

The newly-formed pond in front of 6 tee is quite impressive (above and below).

Since my last post, the unwanted pond in front of the third green is now nearly up to the green's edge and is probably three-feet deep.

As you can see, we're not dealing with an ideal situation and even the rough has ice under the remaining snow.  You'd be hard-pressed to find an area without ice accumulation, and as has been discussed in prior posts, turf and ice don't always get along.  The good news is that the ice has formed late enough in the season that we aren't yet worried about it dying due to suffocation/anoxia.  With Poa annua, we start to worry about anoxia after 45 continuous days of ice cover, and at this point in the season, this is unlikely (but certainly possible).  Thus, as long as the turf didn't suffer crown hydration injury (which is instantaneous death), we are optimistic about the health of our greens to this point.  And, although crown hydration may have occurred, we don't think that is has to this point.

The previously-pictured areas of deep standing/frozen water do concern us.  We suspect that these areas will suffer damage, but it's impossible to say to what extent they will be injured.  Although the ponds that formed are the largest that we've ever seen on the course, the sloping topography of the course limited the amount of areas that collected this runoff water.

At this point, there is nothing that we can do to alleviate the situation, but if the ice cover remains on the greens for the 45-day threshold, we will considering removing it.  While the situation may look and sound ominous, we are holding out hope and are at least grateful that this didn't happen in early January.