The Country 16/02/26: Phil Duncan talks to Jamie Mackay

Monday’s resident weatherman has been kept busy over the weekend.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Wrapping the country with Phil Duncan from where the watch Phil.
The worst of it's over supposedly for the North Island.
It's creeping south this unfortunate weather event.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, the storm at the moment yesterday it pulled in
towards the lower North Island, especially Hawk's Bay down to Wellington.
This morning you can see it on the rain radar.
It is actually starting to move offshore again. So I
mean it's been offshore the whole time, but it's moving
further offshore now and as it does that the winds
and the rain ease in the North Island. But then

(00:32):
later today, tonight, tomorrow, that low drifts southwards and so
that's why the rain is now pushing already into Canterbury.
And now I see that met Service that n't got
a weather watch out for heavy rain for eastern parts
of Dunedin. So we are oh sorry of Otago. So
we are seeing the low moving southwards, but it's fracturing now.
It's breaking apart a lot more as far as the

(00:54):
rain is concerned, and the worst of the winds should
start to ease back if they haven't already. They'll start
to ease this afternoon and tonight.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Hey, Andrew Hoggard made a really interesting point. He was
talking about the big weather event I think off the
top of my head in the Manu or two in
two thousand and four, and it fell on February's sixteenth,
or was it Gabrielle one or t'ther? But here we
go again on February sixteen. Why is it so active
at this time of the year.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, yeah, February and March. I mean it's odd a
little bit at the same dates. But around February middle,
especially the middle of February through to the start of April,
that is when we get some of our fastest growing,
largest storms of the year. They can rapidly develop. And
that's because while our summer weather starts to come to
an end around about the middle of February, it starts

(01:40):
to break apart a bit. The sea is still warming
up and it doesn't get to its peak until March.
So you've got the warm waters of the sea and
then this approaching kind of colder autumn air, and those
two combined can produce very big storms from February through
to April. And that's where you know, got the well
Heini disaster in there in the middle of April as well,
so you've got the sort of line of big storms

(02:01):
that hit. That's why we have so many Easter weekend storms.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Does the weather come right for people midwek onwards, because
it's all about recovery now it does.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
The good news is this low basically falls apart by Thursday.
It's south of the country and it's very weak, but
coincidentally behind it on Wednesday Thursday is another storm and
almost the exact same tracking, but the difference this time
has been the second one, and it's quite normal to
have two storms one after each other if things haven't
changed much around them. That next one's going to hit

(02:31):
the Chatdam Islands, so they've got serious wind coming in
for Wednesday Thursday and a bit of rain. The rest
of the country, the mainland and the North Islands, they'll
be seeing westerly winds turning southwest and high pressure coming
in this weekend. So I'm much better forecast than most.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Phil Duncan there from weather Watch, doing an excellent job
as always