March 23rd is World Meteorological Day, a day when National Weather Services around the world commemorate the establishment of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), which occurred on this day in 1950. WMO is a global agency which co-ordinates meteorological and hydrological activities. Having international collaboration is very important, as weather will not stop and wait at the border between two countries!

Celebrating the increased participation of women in meteorology

March 2016
 

International Women’s Day is held every year in March and to mark this occasion we want to give a big shout out to all the great women working here at MetService. Since 2001 we have trained 34 women and 30 men to be World Meteorology Organisation (WMO) qualified meteorologists. Twenty years ago the statistics were very different.

It may seem obvious. Weather is what we experience locally day-to-day and week-to-week, while climate is a background signal sitting ‘behind’ the weather, observed at the seasonal, annual or even decadal time scale. But the interplay between what is dominate in the short-term and what prevails in the longer run, is not so straight forward. For example, 2015 was a very dry year for regions in the north and east of both islands of New Zealand. But there were rain events in these areas, and some of them were very heavy.

The annual average fogs for Wellington Airport is 6 fogs per year, much rarer than at Christchurch (50 days per year) or Dunedin Airport (64 days per year) or Hamilton (92 days per year), yet it is very disruptive when it does roll in off the sea and can last for hours at a time.  Interestingly, Wellington gets more fog days in summer while fogs occur in winter for many other airports. Wellington airport is a hub for domestic commercial air traffic, therefore even short closures have major flow on effects for passengers and other airports around the country.

 This guest blog was produced by Cancer Society NZ.

Sunburn now could lead to melanoma skin cancer later in life – no matter what your age or skin type.  This is a lesson learnt too late and it can be started early by educating children to become Sunsmart savvy.

Here is an explainer on the difference between the rain radar imagery and rain forecast imagery available on metservice.com and how to use them.

Rain radar

This article was written in November 2015 and relates to the El Niño conditions at that time
 

The Auckland forecast for Monday 12 October 2015 included mention of the following: '... isolated showers ...' and ' ... southwesterly winds ...'. From time to time you’ll hear the word 'isolated' in weather forecasts, so let’s see what it means with reference to observational data, some of which is available on www.metservice.com.  

The Japan Meteorological Agency launched a geostationary weather satellite called Himawari-8 in October 2014. “Himawari” means sunflower, and the name has been given to a series of satellites that we can look forward to in coming years. “Geostationary” means the satellite rotates “in sync” with the Earth, always above the same point over the equator.

Have you ever thought that for aeroplane pilots, every day at work is a blue-sky day? Soaring above the clouds you might think that the weather isn’t such a big deal. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Pilots are dependent on weather information at every stage in their flights. In this blog post, we discuss one crucial aspect of aviation weather that affects both pilots and passengers – turbulence.

The nature of turbulence