New Zealand lies mid-way between the tropics and the Southern Ocean, and our day-to-day weather can arrive from either direction.

Besides the coastal waters, the MetService forecasting team produces marine forecasts for a number of smaller areas where there is a lot of recreational boating activity. These forecasts are routinely issued four times every day; they are monitored continually and updated more frequently if conditions warrant it.

Recreational Forecasts

MetService's forecasting team produces marine forecasts for New Zealand coastal waters. These forecasts are routinely issued four times every day; they are monitored continually and updated more frequently if conditions warrant it.

Coastal Forecasts

Forecasts for coastal waters cover the area from the coastline to 60 nautical miles (about 100km) out to sea. The New Zealand coast is divided into 18 areas, as shown in figure 1:

Weather balloons have been released for decades around New Zealand to record data throughout the lower layers of the atmosphere. They have been used to measure everything from the base of low cloud to atmospheric wind and temperature profiles. One of the first people to use weather balloons was French Meteorologist Léon Teisserenc de Bort. He released hundreds of weather balloons from his observatory in Trappes, France. His experiments lead to the discovery of the tropopause and the stratosphere.

Friday 19 December 2014 sees us gather to farewell John Hickman QSO, Director of the New Zealand Meteorological Service from 1977 to his retirement in 1988. John passed away on 13 December aged 87, after a life of significant contribution to New Zealand's weather knowledge and progress.

Christmas Day in New Zealand can be a hit and miss affair, weather wise. Some years, a High arrives in time for Santa. Christmas Day 2009 was beautifully fine and warm across the country, with Dunedin hitting 32°C, and many other centres approaching  25°C.

The development of modern radar started in 1886, when German physicist Heinrich Hertz showed that radio waves could be reflected from solid objects. In 1904, another German, Huelsmeyer, was the first to build a simple ship detection device, successfully detecting a ship in dense fog. In the pre-war period (the 1930s), many nations were working on radar devices. A major advance occurred once systems were developed that allowed short ‘pulses’ of radio energy to be generated, allowing the range of the object to be determined by timing the pulses.

During October 2014, MetService Meteorologist John Law spent five days in Antarctica. We thought you would be interested to see Antarctica through John's eyes, so he kept a blog to report back on what he was up to each day!

May 2009

Victoria University of Wellington will offer the country’s first Master’s degree in meteorology, in partnership with New Zealand’s official weather forecaster MetService.

MetService’s long-range weather radar, situated near Kaeo in Northland, officially commenced operations on Monday 28 July 2014, with early imagery from the radar enabling MetService forecasters to provide very valuable information to Civil Defence and the public ahead of the June storms experienced in the region that year.