A satellite receiver ("dish"), for improved reception of data from polar-orbiting weather satellites, was installed at MetService Head Office in Kelburn in February 2013.
Benefits
Polar-orbiting weather satellites yield rich information about the atmosphere, valuable for New Zealand weather forecasting. Benefits of faster access to more data, and sharper identification tools, include:
During the summer of 2012-2013, anticyclones dominated the New Zealand area. Many places had little or no rainfall since early February.
The map below shows the average mean sea level pressure over the New Zealand area over Jan/Feb 2013. There's no doubt about the pressure being high and not changing very much. Because this map shows averaged pressures, we don't see the few troughs that passed across Aotearoa New Zealand during that time.
If you were looking at radar imagery overnight Thursday 21 February 2013 or this morning (Friday 22 February 2013), you could be forgiven for thinking that there was quite a lot of light precipitation over the northern half of the North Island and west of Auckland.
It's been a while since a rapidly-deepening low passed close to, or over, New Zealand. I thought it might be interesting to take a quick look at why the "bomb" low of Saturday 03 March 2012 deepened so quickly and why the winds around it affected the areas they did. First of all, here is a series of weather maps covering the period 1pm Friday 02 March to 1am Sunday 04 March.
In the days following Wednesday 6 July 2011, stormy westerly conditions affected New Zealand. In this blog, we'll look at why.
Below is the mean sea level analysis - the weather map - for 6am Sunday 10 July. In between big highs over the mid South Pacific and south of western Australia is a really large trough; it's the area shaded light blue. The weather map looked like this, more or less, since Wednesday 6 July: that is, the big features on it aren't moving much.
The Wellington Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), operated by MetService on behalf of the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority, is one of nine VAACs that operate under the International Airways Volcano Watch. Wellington VAAC is supported through the collaborative effort of MetService, GNS, Airways New Zealand and aircraft operators.
This blog post is the third in a three-part series discussing verification of MetService forecasts. Here, we present the method used for verifying Severe Weather Warnings, along with some recent examples.
This article relates to weather experienced in late September 2010
Written in September 2010