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.
Midday analysis for 25th December 2009.
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.
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.
The Northland flooding event, July 8th to 12th 2014
The average July monthly rainfall total at Kaikohe, Northland, is around 180mm. In just one week in July 2014 the rainfall recorded there totalled 477mm, and that wasn’t even the wettest part of the region.
Written by Chris Webster Metservice Meteorologist
Written by Erick Brenstrum, Meteorologist
Written by John Law, Meteorologist
If you look back to the Towns & Cities forecast tabs or the Rural forecasts, you will notice that at the bottom of the 10 day forecasts is this phrase: “Forecasts and temperatures for days 1-5 are produced by MetService meteorologists. Forecasts and temperatures for days 6-10 are automatically generated by MetService's computer weather modelling system.”