Will we see more settled weather in March? - Phil Duncan

0:00This is a podcast from Rover. Let's have a look at what Mark has installed for us. We're the ones with Bill Duncan from We're the Watch. We were just saying off air, nice to see you by the way. Yeah, bloody freezing in the mornings now. What has happened? It's funny, isn't it? Like, I think this happened back in spring as well. And like this switch, where I always say Mother Nature has no idea, you know, of the calendar date that we've got here as human beings. And yet sometimes magically at the start of a new season, the weather just switches on that same like day or two. So I certainly had that this week, and I was saying in my weather video this week on yesterday, that if this setup was occurring in August, we'd be talking about snow to sea level. Like it was, it was, it's a decent southerly change, which we can all feel at the moment, obviously, because gone are the overnight temperatures of 18, 20 degrees and replaced that with single digits in many places this morning. Yeah, the really the big thing that most people talk about this year is,

1:01well, where's Summer being? It just hasn't been there. It's telling me. Yeah, it's been, you know, I got asked the other day, someone asked me to rate it out of 10, and I gave it a six, which I thought afterwards was actually a bit harsh, because where I am in Auckland, it's been all right. Like, I don't think it's been that bad. It hasn't been great though, especially if you're camping. Like, if you've been, if you tried to have a summer away in a tent or a caravan, you've probably got to have stronger opinion than I do. But it's, you know, it depends on where you are in the country. There have been certain areas. The Western lower North Island, like Hottofenua, Munnawa 2, those areas, company coasts. They've had a cold summer, you know, a lot of West Lies with cloud, straight off Cook Street, kind of like it's still spring or autumn in the peak of summer. The lower South Island has had frequent cold changes that have come through. And, you know, if you look at Dunedin's temperatures, a lot of 14s and 17s have been kind of in the forecast this summer. And then you got to the top of the country,

2:02and it's been drier, and it's been cloudy though. It's certainly been cloudy, but then, you know, if you can split the top of the North Island up into pieces, those that got the landslides and the flooding and those that did not. Because the flooding that we've had this summer was what I would describe as hit and miss. It wasn't necessarily everywhere. Other than maybe the east coast of the North Island, which certainly had a couple of big rain events. Yeah, they got hammered, those poor buggers, my god. They must be feeling like this is just normal. We just get these, you know, every sort of couple of years. This is what happens, you know. At least they get West Lies, and then they have a dry hot drought summer. You know, like it's an interesting part of the country. I grew up in Bay of Plenty, and my first memories are in the early 1980s. And I just remember one natural disaster after the other, whether it was, you know, white island erupting, the edge came earthquake, and then cyclone boulder. Those were all in a very short phase in the 1980s that I remember so strongly.

3:02And boulder in particular, because it caused this damage that could be seen for decades afterwards, especially the landslides on the hills, which are now being replaced by Gabrielle on the storm this year and, you know, multiple storm events. But it is a part of the country that slips away very easily. And for those of us nerds that took geography at school, like that was one of the first things you learned was how it's a different tectonic plate, different soil, different lots of different things that make up the east coast of the North Island. And so slips from East Cape down to Gisborne, Tardafini, Hawks Bay, white and upper even, and Wellington. Those areas fall away as those parts of Canterbury and Tasman area. You know, those areas slip away easily. Then you can have like, you know, 300 millimeters of rain on the west coast and nothing to see here. So it's not necessarily about the weather. It's sometimes just about the ground underneath it, which I think is always missing in New Zealand that part of the discussion. Not to dismiss these flood and landslide events,

4:04but the more we understand which regions slip easily, which ones don't, the more we can plan for the changing climate. And I'll give you another example. Canterbury, Christchurch, Christchurch in particular. I'm often surprised. I'm not really surprised, but it does, I guess it does surprise me that they get a period of rain. And the next thing I know, all the news outlets, saying Christchurch underwater, because 40 millimeters in a couple of hours floods Christchurch, whereas you can have 40 millimeters of most other cities without anyone even noticing really that it fell. Hmm. What a really interesting perspective all of that is. Yeah, there's more to it than just millimeters fallen, right? Yeah. The usually the area and where do people live? You know, Christchurch is very low-lying, as we discovered in the earthquakes, just all that liquefaction that occurred, very low-down swampy areas that are drying now, obviously. But it's one of those places that it doesn't take a lot for nature to disturb the set of, you know,

5:06the local buildings and infrastructure, whereas other places around the country. You know, if you think about somewhere like New Plymouth, they get a lot of rain in New Plymouth, probably two, three times the amount of Christchurch gets. When, you know, how often do you hear about New Plymouth having a flood? It's just because it's in a naturally-training area off of Big Mountain, it's in the perfect place to get fair bit of rain. So it's, yeah, it's not always about the weather hitting you. It's usually, to me, a lot of it is about where is it hitting and how does the geography play a role in that? Wow, that's so cool. Good stuff. And hopefully, yeah, that makes people think about things a bit more. Hey, March, what are we going to get in March? Well, it's interesting. March can often be summer-like, even though, you know, the temperatures today aren't. But, you know, it can be sunny, beautiful. Autumn is the most popular season of the year in New Zealand. We've done a lot of polling on this over the decades. It just beats summer, a little bit more. And I put that down to the fact that most of the comments we received

6:07said it's because the nights are cooler, can sleep easier. And, you know, the sun doesn't get up quite so early in the morning. So there's just a few little things that make March. In particular, March, a really wonderful time of the year. And sometimes, the high pressure belt that we notice was fairly absent over summer can light itself up with us. And so this high pressure belt, which goes all the way around rather than hemisphere, it's like kind of like a belt on the pants of planet Earth. That belt of high pressure can stream in with one after the other. And we're sort of seeing that showing up at the moment for the first two weeks of March. There is a lot of high pressure around. Now, this is also the peak of the cyclone season. And I always repeat that any long-range forecast can always be broken by a tropical storm. So you can say it's going to be dry and no rain. And then you get a cyclone and it floods everything. And everyone says, you didn't know what you're talking about. But the overall pattern is drier than usual for the next couple of weeks. But we are seeing a lot of low pressure up around Australia.

7:10The Coral Sea. The Coral Sea is a breeding ground for storms that hit New Zealand. And so we always keep an eye on anything up there. But for now, big high pressure, that is the next major headline really for the next couple of weeks. That is again very interesting. What is the status of that at the moment? Basically, it's gone. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of today, in fact, that the Bureau of Meteorology out of Australia, they're the government organisation that we trust the most for this sort of information. They are pretty much saying it's going to be gone any time now. So whether that's this week or in two weeks from now, that's the kind of time frame. So we don't really expect too much influence from a laneniuside. That might mean fewer easterly winds around the country, especially at the top of the country. And maybe a little more sunshine around because we've had a very gloomy summer. And this will break up some of the cloud. But one step forward, one step backwards because March is when sea surface temperatures reach their peak.

8:14So on land that occurs end of January up to about mid-February usually. But on the sea, it takes longer that thermal lag. Kind of like when you flick the kettle on, it's not instantly hot. And so you wait a few more weeks. And so March is the peak of the temperatures in the sea, which makes it the peak of the cyclone season. So while lanenius fading cyclone seasons now peaking, that doesn't end until April. So it's kind of interesting. It peaks in March and then it's gone by the end of April. So it's sort of a slow build up and then flip gone. And so that's usually what happens. So we'll be waiting to see what happens from that point of view. I would say, you know, there is a moderate risk of a tropical storm reaching New Zealand over the next four weeks because it is pretty busy up around Australia at the moment. What are the chances of El Nino forming later in the year? So that is definitely being talked about. The Bureau of Meteorology in their latest statement. That's the, that's the need for Australia. And they basically said that the, the Aldenio is certainly showing up in the long range models.

9:18But that to be, and that's that's showing up sometime around the middle of winter or the start of winter. So maybe June, July. But it's a very long way out to be talking about it. And I always keep it simple like you're training someone to drive a car. And so we're in the gear of La Niña. The next gear is neutral. And then the gear after that is El Nino. So you don't go from La Niña to El Nino. You've got to go to neutral first. And so I don't focus on the, the two steps away. I focus on the next step. So that means we're going back to neutral. What does that mean? It means not a great deal of, of anything really. It means our predominant wind is a westerly usually more west coast rain. West coast didn't get as much rain over summer. So that will balance things back out a wee bit in that area if it's textbook. And neutral can also dry things out. There's actually not a lot of difference between neutral and El Nino, a weak El Nino. It's a lot of westerly driven weather. And that can dry out inland and eastern areas, keep western and southern areas a little cooler.

10:21So we'll see if that eventuates. But like I say, for now we're just going into neutral, we're going into neutral in autumn. Which means we will just really probably barely notice that it's just a usual sort of autumn showing up. That's my expectation anyway. It's interesting. Okay. And whereabouts have we got the dry conditions at the moment like soil moisture and stuff like that? Who's battling for the moisture? It's not even the New Zealand drought index. You know, a year ago was full of parts of the country coloured in different shading, saying it's either dry or extremely dry or whatever the criteria is. That disappeared in January. There was nothing. When I did the February climate watch update, there was, I put the map up, there was nothing on it. There wasn't one part of the country that had the sort of shading on it. Now that we're in March, there are a few. Because we have had some long dry stretches, despite some of the rain. The driest part of New Zealand is the farm north. And they've actually been often on, drier than the rest of the country for a number of months now.

11:23After Hawks Bay had their dry patch fixed between Hastings, Napier, that area, that's gone now. But so the farm north, Kaitaya, would be the main centre caught up in the much drier than usual weather up there. It's getting extremely dry in the farm north. They've missed out on a number of these low pressure zones over summer. There are other spots showing up. There's a little bit of Manuwa 2, Horde of Fenewa that's showing up. There's one other part of the country that's just gone from my brain where it is. But these are very, very small little areas where Auckland, that was another one. These are just little areas that are showing up where if you're a Gardner, maybe you might notice it more than the most other people. Or if you're a grower, you might notice it that it's a little bit dry. You've got to start watering things a wee bit. But other than the farm north, which is defined as the top of Northland, kind of like we've got the deep south, which is really only southland, the farm north is actually just the top part of Northland. It's north of Funga Day. So that's the only area really that's in a position where they need rain. Most of the places could easily handle the dry weather that's about to come on through

12:25as we go into the middle of March. Because I think that's how long some of this dry weather might linger. Wow. Okay. That's been brilliantly comprehensive. What a breakdown. Thank you. Explain so beautifully. It's such an ungodly time in the morning as well. It's a good time. I love this time of year. When I woke up this morning and I felt that cold feeling in the house and not to have all the dry eyes, I've got an air conditioning unit in my bedroom, which, you know, if you fall asleep with it on, you wake up with really dry eyes and every, every throw, it's dry. It's horrible. But this morning it was just cool and crisp. It was perfect. The cat. The cat has returned to the bedroom after three months absence. It's just, I don't know, I just love, I absolutely love March. And I love the start of April. It's my favorite time of the year. So if we can have these sunny afternoons and cool mornings, you've got a happy little weather forecast to hear for a couple of days. It's a great way to put it. Yeah, we've been having freezing mornings

13:26and I absolutely hate it. I can't stand it. And at night as well, I'm just like, oh man, we've always differed in this stove. Philip, that's just our genetic makeup. I would imagine. Yeah, but. And I've changed. I've changed when I was younger. You remember Bob McDevitt from next year? Yeah. He's still around. He's based out in Palmerston North these days. I still stay in touch with him every now and then, not as much as I should do. But we used to have lunches together when he worked at net service. And I was setting up weather watch. And you remember back in the day, net service didn't like me too much. But Bob McDevitt always did. And he was kind of like the broker between us and his bosses. And we would have these little lunches. And we'd often talk about what we like. A real weather nerd conversation. Like Dungeons and Dragons, but weather people. And we were talking about what our favorite weather was. And at that time, I would say tropical cyclone, you know, hot humid weather, windy raining. And he was like, I'm the opposite. I like a big frosty cold high.

14:26And now, you know, fast forward 15, 20 years. I'm exactly the same. I like a frosty cold morning. Don't like the humidity at all. Although I still kind of think tropical cyclones are exciting. But I'm a lot more cautious of them these days. Well, that's so cool. And I didn't know that Bob was an early supporter of yours. Well, I remember Bob. That's the 1990s when I was at high school. He used to send me stickers. And he would send me free weather maps, which he wasn't supposed to do. And like, it was, it was really cool. He got me inspired. And he's to this day still gives me pointers. If I'm, if I say something in a video, like, I don't understand much about, you know, the NGO, which is a tropical pulse of moisture. I don't know much about that side of things. Next thing I know, email clips to watch. You know, he's just fantastic. He's such a nice guy. So hello, Bob McDowell. If you're listening from from Palmerston North. Hello, Bob McDowell. Indeed. Very good.

15:26Check out where the watch people. Give them a Google, get the apps. Do what you got to do because it's as good as it gets. Where the wise, you need to be informed. I feel lovely to talk to you, man. Thank you so much. You too, buddy. Have a good day. Warm up.