The season of stress is upon us! Spring weather brings all sorts of challenges to many of you (and to us as weather forecasters, too). Of course, one of the biggest issues in early September is dealing with snowstorms for newborn livestock and frosts for those that don’t want damage to plants, vines and buds. Many of us are in a heightened sense of alert for the next couple more months.
The weather pattern at the moment is highly chaotic. Major storms down over the Southern Ocean have helped dominate our weather pattern for the past week and look to continue for September’s first week.
These storms have had central air pressure down around 920 hectopascals, which is incredibly low. But high-pressure zones over Australia, the north Tasman Sea and near New Zealand put the lid on just how far north those storms can go – and that’s what creates those gigantic windy westerlies that stretch all the way from south of Australia across the Tasman and then over New Zealand.
We said goodbye to El Niño back in April and we’ve had a “neutral” winter season, evident with the huge high-pressure zones that we had and the many large low-pressure zones too.
I’ve said a number of times that this has been “the winter of big air pressure”. Now that spring is here (at least on the meteorological calendar), will we still get these “big” weather systems? It certainly appears for the start of September that, yes, they will continue with big storms south of us and large highs out over Australia putting NZ on the edge of it all.
At the time of writing this column the climate driver update from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology suggests that we’re still in a neutral season but that we are getting closer to a possible La Niña.
It’s worth noting when you look at the various models from all around the world it still shows that the mean average keeps conditions in “neutral” for the rest of 2024, although it does certainly flirt with La Niña during spring (especially October and November).
But those same long-range models suggest that we’re heading back into neutral as we head towards summer.
To make sense of all of that confusion, it basically means not a lot is going to change with our weather pattern. There might be a bit more life to the north of New Zealand and we’ve certainly seen a few low-pressure zones over the past two weeks (and they are worth keeping an eye on because the wet season in the tropics doesn’t normally start for another month or two, so this may well be a sign of a very weak La Niña forming).
Either way, New Zealand remains two small mountainous islands partially stuck in the Roaring Forties … in other words, don’t get too hooked on what might happen months from now, but my general feeling is more chaos before there is a stronger pattern emerging.
In Focus Podcast | Rewiring rural New Zealand’s approach to power
Rocketing power prices and uncertainty about generating more are keeping many people up at night, but Mike Casey reckons farmers have everything they need to power up right now. The chief executive of Rewiring Aotearoa has transformed his cherry orchard into a solar powered operation and he reckons every farmer should do the same.
To Mike, it’s just a sound business decision as his power bills have plummeted, the capital outlay will be repaid in five years and he’s sorted if a storm knocks out the regional power supply.
