The last week in January 2010 will be remembered by many over the central North Island for the frequent thunderstorms that developed in the afternoon, often lasting well into the evening. Conditions changed little during the week with a slack pressure gradient over the North Island allowing afternoon sea breezes to combine with abundant low level moisture, triggering heavy showers and thunderstorms inland. Many of these storms were slow moving, prompting a number of Severe Thunderstorm Warnings as radar detected torrential rain and hail in some cells.

It must have been an insightful man who decided to build the new meteorological office on the end of the ridge above the Botanical Gardens. If you are lucky you can observe some beautiful meteorology from the roof of the building. The Director at the time, Dr John Gabities, probably had a big say in the matter. Being a meteorologist himself, he would have appreciated the value of that siting.  At lunch time on Friday (22 January 2010), I was on the roof and noticed a little drama unfolding on the harbour and took a photo with my cell phone.

Feels like temperature, to the nearest degree, gives an idea of how cool or warm the air feels to us.

When schools break up for the holidays, and you're a parent or caregiver wondering how you're going to get through the next several weeks. :-) How about setting your child(ren) a challenge - to keep a weather log for a continuous 14-day period. Depending on their age and sophistication, you could make the log shorter or longer, and easier or harder. Here are some suggestions...

I recently passed through Auckland International Airport, and paid special attention to the various displays about Jean Batten. You may have seen her Percival Gull aircraft beautifully on display high up in the international terminal heading, as below. There is also a statue of her just outside the international terminal building.

Relative humidity does not measure mugginess.

In New Zealand, most people would not consider May and October to be winter months. This year, however, they were noticeably colder than usual. NIWA remarked upon this in their Climate Summaries for May and October 2009. To quote very selectively from these summaries:

The news in late November 2009 made much of the presence of icebergs heading north out of the Southern Ocean. There is an impressive photo of one of the icebergs here. The story got me thinking again about the amazing properties of water, so I will continue the thread of a previous post by focusing on ice.

As we approach summer in NZ, the Sun gets higher in the sky and increasingly warms the Earth and the air around us. In the early 1600s Galileo Galilei explained that the Earth goes around the Sun, but there's no reason why we can't discuss the apparent movement of the Sun across the sky, as you see it from a frame of reference fixed to the Earth. Let's do that, and investigate the different ways that the Sun drives our seasons.