NZ Weather Forum

jamie wrote:We had a few rain drops earlier. More unstable here than forecast?

Yup the Clouds are dropping a bit of precip despite being quite shallow they are as crisp as small cauliflower's.

re Mt Taranaki:
no holding back in this article
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/artic ... d=11147741

I see thats it was a traditional labour weekend trip

Labour weekend often has fast changing/changeble weather
i.e I bet the trip has been cancelled in the past

it is easy to be an armchair critic
its a great tragedy
hopefully come lessons can be learnt...

labour weekend is traditionally the start of the 'easy' climbing weather. from memory it's an open weekend of climbing almost with a lot of people going up.
as it appears this group were not novices, it does raise some questions as to how this managed to occur.

having climbed that mountain twice i can attest to it's sometime ferocious and very quickly changing weather.
my 2 climbs were done in summer and were very uneventful, but being born and raised under that mountain, you're very aware of it's power.

very sad.

The weather pattern for the Mt Taranaki at the weekend wasn't that settled given a major polar trough was in the Tasman.

A huge burst of elevated lightning over the central Tasman tonight associated with the trough coming off Aussie.
This activity looks headed for NW of South Island tomorrow.

Have tried to climb Taranaki more than once. Didn't succeed, can appreciate how quickly it changes. Should have tried in summer perhaps.

Looks like a trough of low pressure comes into play within the next few days. Thursday and Friday looking like a low risk of some lightning occurring.
GFS was also toying with the possibility with a storm On Saturday but due to a WSW to SW flow makes the chance drop down around 10% also that's when a ridge is expected to come in, so not optimal timing.

Yup quite a bit of lightning this evening in the Tasman, man if only the storms could stay active when they get here.

Hoping we can get some rain from that front tomorrow. Also a low thunderstorm risk with it as Tim suggests. Looks like high cloud cover will cut out afternoon heating though.

Further south, looks like NZ's thunderstorm capital, north Otago could get a few lightning strikes tomorrow afternoon as colder upper level trough moves in.

I was thinking a moderate risk up the coast to about Rakaia river mouth and offshore to the peninsula in a typical SW flow fashion, but some of the latest maps suggest the trough inbehind the cold front could boost a more southerly influence after dark through mid and north Canterbury.
Theres just something about the pressure maps for tomorrow I like in terms of a good coastal typical southerly swathe of storms, isolated initially from mid afternoon south of Rakaia with lighter winds but a boot up the bum around 7-8pm maybe a hit by 10pm in Christchurch.
Will see what the next few runs bring.

Some nice lenticular clouds to my east. Strong winds aloft.

Looking at tomorrows thunderstorm risk for Auckland on GFS. Looks like we will need some good heating tomorrow so hopefully the upper cloud layers can break up. Needing about 20-21C. If a thunderstorm does develop there is a risk of an isolated tornado/outflow gust 50knots. But I would call the set up low risk at the moment as it is conditional on daytime warming. Timing of the front late afternoon/early evening.

Yup Im sticking with my prediction of a low risk of storm's tomorrow in Auckland/Waikato. Metservice still maintaining a Moderate risk but I'm not entirely that optimistic with getting a sufficient hi temp on a prefrontal passage. Especially with pre frontal cloud which usually mucks these setup's up.

tgsnoopy wrote:Have tried to climb Taranaki more than once. Didn't succeed, can appreciate how quickly it changes. Should have tried in summer perhaps.

I went there 5 times and walk round the mountain each occasion, before visit number 6 allowed a successful summiting, the mountain is a magnet for any weather coming off the sea

monthly rainfall up to 243mm for October making it the highest so far for the year.
just edges out September with 239mm.
she's been a wet spring, but then again, it always is.

21mm for the month so far up here - the lowest for the year
We moved into restricted fire season on Monday, I think it is the earliest it has ever happened.

Only 14mm here so far this month.

MS's Akld computer-graph forecasts this morn for this front are interesting: Just 4mm for the North Shore (Whangaparaoa), while the other 3 are between 17mm and 21mm.

Funny how the rainfall tap was suddenly turned off in the north. I am hoping for a convective November to provide rainfall.

To my surprise, we have just run out of water
but then I do have 2 teenage daughters that have a half hour shower every morning!

TCu and Ac Cast around the hills of Oamaru currently

NZstorm wrote:Looking at tomorrows thunderstorm risk for Auckland on GFS. Looks like we will need some good heating tomorrow so hopefully the upper cloud layers can break up. Needing about 20-21C.

Currently sitting on 20, expected to make 21. Hopefully that will help get things going.

yea currently 20.1 here. Managing to get plenty of warming today.

Front is not due untill after 7pm by the looks. I doubt there will be thunder.

had a very heavy shower pass through work earlier this arvo.
came roaring in from the SW and dumped probably an inch in 30mins.
absolutely chucked it down.
didn't look too bad on the radar, but it was apparent on the Westland radar.
however, in town 6km away, my station recorded 0.5mm, and it looked quite sunny out in that direction.

Some Cu going up this afternoon but looking too dry, so everything gradually dissipated.
South to SW winds here.

Really John.. it was SW this morning but been a breezy fresh NE all afternoon still is even some low cloud for about 10 minutes.
Yes much weaker TCU about this afternoon but with the colder pool of air sitting much further south its been kind of expected for the best action down there, as currently there is a thunderstorm over North Otago.
Will keep an eye on the SW as it moves up this evening to see if it produces something even though its very minimal you never know

It's been southerly here since the wind picked up after 10am - the NE didn't make it this far today.