Written by Chris Webster Meteorologist
A recent visit to Sydney International Airport has inspired me to write a little about another famous aviator with a New Zealand connection. Last year I wrote a post about Jean Batten who, in her youth had met the topic of this post, Charles Kingsford Smith. Auckland International Airport is named in honour of Jean Batten and likewise Sydney International Airport is named after Charles Kingsford Smith.
These clouds show waves rolling along and breaking in the sky, similar to the way that waves behave on the sea.
wet and windy conditions battered parts of New Zealand around Friday 13 August
It looked like a row of teeth
Written by Ross Marsden, Meteorologist
On the afternoon of Monday 19 July 2010, a neat set of four persistent contrails moved across the Cook Strait area. NASA's MODIS Rapid Response System captured the contrails in the image stream from the Aqua space craft which was over Wellington at about 2:20 pm. You can see the image on the MODIS web site here: http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=NewZealand.2010200.aqua.1km Here’s part of the MODIS image.
Written by Chris Noble, Meteorologist
Clouds come in many different types and are characterised and named according to both their shape and height in the atmosphere. While a single snapshot in time at a given location may only contain one type of cloud, there are many days when multiple cloud types can be observed in the sky at once. The satellite images below is a nice example of different cloud types sitting at different levels above Waikato. Here's what the satellite image looked like Saturday afternoon 3 July 2010, for southwestern parts of Waikato near Kawhia Harbour:
Written by Chris Webster, Meteorologist
Written by Chris Webster, Meteorologist
We had an enquiry from an astute member of the public asking about the comings and goings of rain. They had noticed that in southerly weather the rain has a tendency to "come in bands (e.g., 20 minutes rain, 20 mins dry, 20 mins rain etc.) rather than as a more constant rain that comes with northerlies". They were wondering why this was. This is a good question and I will try to answer it here.
All the best for researching your school assignment about weather and climate during the school holidays :)
There has been a lot of rain in many parts of New Zealand over the past two weeks. One of the few places to escape this was the sunny West Coast of South Island - the days are clear and stunning there when the flow is southeasterly.