The science behind the new Auckland forecasts
We’ve added a lot more detail to the forecasts for Auckland on metservice.com.
In addition to the existing Auckland forecast on the Towns & Cities page, we’ve divided the greater Auckland region into five sub-regions – each with its own characteristic rainfall, temperature and wind patterns:
To provide hourly predictions of air temperature, wind speed and rainfall for these sub-regions, we’re using
- Data from our own localised-for-New-Zealand weather modelling and statistical processing systems (for more about this, see the blog on MetService’s Investment in Forecasting)
- Observations of temperature and wind speed from representative weather stations within each of the sub-regions (see next point), which we’re blending with the modelled data for the first few hours of the forecast.
- The weather stations we’re using are Whangaparaoa (for North Shore), Whenuapai (for Waitakere), Auckland Airport (for Manukau), and Ardmore (for Hunua). For Auckland City we’ve created a “virtual weather station” near the Newton Interchange; this will do the job for now, but we want to replace it with a real station within Auckland City soon.
The index map at the bottom left of the map area links back to the Auckland Towns & Cities page you’re already familiar with, containing the overall Auckland urban forecast and max/min temperatures for the next 10 days.
This initiative was partly motivated by the great feedback we received about the ‘dust graphs’ of wind speed and rainfall added to the Christchurch pages in February, to alert people to the potential dust nuisance in the areas affected by liquefaction and, more recently, demolition of large buildings.
As always, we’re looking forward to hearing what you think! Tweet @MetService or drop us an email at enquiries@metservice.com