May Summary

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Nev
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May Summary

Unread post by Nev »

Here's NIWA's preliminary Climate Summary for May 2009.

No real surprises. Temps well below normal and rainfall well above normal in most places. The national average temp was 1.6°C below normal. Sunshine hours in the six main centres were either about normal or slightly above normal for Auckland and Hamilton.
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by David »

Where did you find the summary Nev? I was searching their new site for quite a while about 15 minutes ago and couldn't find this anywhere. Not even the site-wide search results revealed it's location.

Is it plausible that Palmerston Nth had a gust of 183km/h?? Sounds like an error to me.
I also noticed the word "mini tornado" thrown in there :wave:
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by Manukau heads obs »

I see it was the coldest may recorded in quite a few places, up to 3.5C below normal, which is alot!!
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by RWood »

Good point David - they are supposed to post here:

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publicat ... cs/monthly

So I assume Nev must have an inside track to something...

They could have mentioned that equal to May 1992, this was the coldest May nationally since 1959. For Kelburn, 1992 was about 0.5C colder and 1959 0.7C colder.
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by Nev »

Yeah NIWA's new-look site could do with some tweaking - it's under Climate Publications.

Noticed they use the 'm-word' a lot, as I think they rely mostly on media reports (guess that's one difference between a Meteorologist and a Climatologist :B ).
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by RWood »

Found it here, even though the other link isn't showing it yet:

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publicat ... msum-09-05

The high sunshine value for Greymouth may be dubious as it has a relatively new EWS that
currently looks as if its values are too high.

The other link I quoted is also under Climate summaries, and still isn't showing it (April and earlier are there however). A "programming" issue, should be only temporary.
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by spwill »

A very interesting May :smile: the event that will stick in my mind for a long time was the spectacular Waterspout off Taurnga on May 11, not mentioned in the summary :rolleyes:
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by RWood »

This global summary, at least at first glance, seems to heard to reconcile with some of the earlier May information.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/res ... lobal.html
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by Manukau heads obs »

interesting
so most of the globe was warming than normal for may
but NZ , and canada and a few others areas were colder than normal
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Re: May Summary

Unread post by Inny Binny »

Four global temperature ones have their data here:

NCDC
GISS
RSS
UAH

I'm keeping an eye on the surface stations project to see if the USHCN and GHCN are reliable, which I think the first two use.

Doesn't look like May (globally) was particularly warm or cold compared to recent years though. Obviously higher than the average 30 year/100 year temps.
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