Footage from tonight’s 7News:
Tag Archives: Weather
God is in the Rain
I awoke this morning to rain outside my apartment window. I have now just arrived at uni quite wet after walking to the bus, and walking from the bus to my office. But I am rejoicing.
It is odd to rejoice about rain, in fact many people curse the rain, but I like rain, it is awesome, particularly after such a long period of little to no rain.
Rain is the bringer of life, it keeps us alive, it keeps animals alive, it keeps plants and trees alive, it keeps the world alive. Rain is so often referred to as being depressing. But I think we should celebrate in the rain, celebrate life, and celebrate how without water falling freely from the sky we wouldn’t be here.
When the king smiles, there is life; his favor refreshes like a gentle rain. – Proverbs 16:15 NLT
Its Climate Change Silly
The Herald has an article summarising New Zealand’s year of ‘weird weather’: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10617504
We basked through the warmest winter in 150 years and shivered through the coldest spring in decades – all during a year of weird weather.
Globally, this year was the fifth warmest in the past 130 years, and capped off New Zealand’s hottest decade on record.
But that would have been little comfort to those stuck in record snowstorms during the coldest October in six decades.
MetService weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said three months stood out as the “weirdest weather”. A chilly May was countered by an unseasonably warm August, before temperatures plunged to record lows in October.
McDavitt said the icy spring weather was caused by troughs stalled over New Zealand because of large anticyclones over Australia – coating Sydney with dust storms while Kiwis shivered in late snowfalls.
The hottest temperature was 38C, recorded in Culverden in Canterbury on February 8.
At the moment all the Climate Change Deniers are carrying on about the massive snow falls as being proof that the world is not warming. However the point is not about a few isolated snow storms (yes the top of the USA and Europe are isolated in the size of the world), they completely missing the point claiming this. While the overall temperture of the world may be increasing becuase of this it will unsettle the weather patterns around the world and we are clearly seeing the affects of this in NZ. Instead of Winter being cold and Summer being hot we are getting dramatically changing weather patterns throughout the seasons and the year. Take a look at Winter this year – May and June coldest in decades – we even had ice and -4c in northern Albany! And then the traditional coldest month of August was warmest on recored. And lets not even start on October.
It is simple. The world’s climate is changing and I find it hard to believe that all this changes in the weather patterns are anything but caused by humans and their direct actions.
Dust Storm in the Tasman
From flying over last night. The clouds below looked like fog, they were well below the other clouds, but had an impressive tinge to them as seen here.
More info here: http://weatherwatchcentre.co.nz/content/dust-storm-heading-our-way
August was hottest on record
http://weatherwatch.co.nz/content/hottest-august-record
It’s not global warming, it’s just good weather – last month was the warmest August New Zealand has seen since temperatures were first recorded 155 years ago.
I dispute that. It is well known that temperatures are rising and climate change has been a major cause of this over the past few years. It is global warming and climate change as simple as that.
New Zealanders could thank strong westerly winds coming off Australia for an average temperature almost 2degC warmer than usual, said Auckland climate scientist Jim Salinger.
The average temperature for New Zealand last month was 10.4degC, which gave the normally wintery month the kind of temperatures usually seen in spring.
Regions that registered the highest temperatures above average were areas such as Central Otago and inland Canterbury, where the Australian air kept both days and nights relatively warm.
Auckland and Tauranga shared the title of the warmest main centre for August, while Wellington was both the sunniest and wettest, Dunedin the driest, and Christchurch the coolest.
So in the space of three months we have had the coldest June in 40 years and the hottest August ever. That sounds like climate extremes and climate change to me, too much of a coincidence to happen so near each other.
Global Warming hits Auckland
A MetService weather station at Whenuapai Air Base has recorded the hottest temperature reading ever in Auckland.
Temperatures peaked at 32.4 degrees Celsius during the 3pm hour, equalling the previous high recorded in the Auckland Domain in February 1872 – 137 years ago.
That temperature followed the highest overnight low for February since records on that began in 1961. The temperature did not drop below 22.1C between Wednesday evening and yesterday morning.
WeatherWatch.co.nz’s thermometer went one better, recording an unofficial 34C in West Auckland – a temperature that was fuelled by a hot nor’wester.
WeatherWatch head weather analyst Philip Duncan said although the humidity in Auckland was lower yesterday than on other days, the intense heat and sunnier skies meant it felt more like 38C.
Auckland’s previous temperature high this year was 28.2 degrees, on the North Shore earlier this month.
From:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10556519
and:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10556442
I was lucky yesterday, I was in a air conditioned office. However, last Sunday it almost hit 40C in Albany (the high of 28.2C).
The problem with the official tempertures is they do not take into affect humidity. So while yesterday was the hottest in 130 years, five days ago it felt hotter. I am a little guttered that I lost the screenshots I had taken of the weather stations on Sunday. But I have got hardly any sleep in the last week. Just insane.
The Parachute Diaries: Monday: Living On A Prayer
I awoke at 6.40am on Monday morning and snoozed until 8am.
Like the previous days I went to the morning meeting but only stayed for the worship. I had planned to listen to the speaker but the sun was intensely hot, I was very tired, and wanted to hang with my mates before they packed up and headed off to other parts of the country.
At the morning service they asked how many people there had been up all night. Apparently the Village had remained packed until 2am and was still going strong at 5am. The best I have done at Parachute is around 3 or 4 in the morning. This year I was a bit more of an oldie and went to bed at 1am each night.
Cool World Vision Artwork. We Are Change!
While I hung out I packed up my stuff and hauled gear back to my car over a number of trips over a period of about three hours. I had to laugh at my car when I saw it. Sunday afternoon had been very windy and because it has been so hot over the past few weeks the ground was very dry. So my car had become covered in dust. And not a little bit dirty I mean coated absolutely coated in dust, it was no longer black but more like brownish grey.
Scoring a carpark at Gate One is pretty cool
Looking from my car towards the main entrance
The main entrance
Looking behind my car... This is still the premo car park
Once I had loaded up my car I went back to the Mainstage to see Late 80s Mercedes play the last act of the festival. Like Friday they went off, probably even more so on the hot Monday afternoon. Being the last band on allowed them to go longer than their advertised 30 minutes and in the end they managed to get all the people from backstage dancing on the stage and everyone still around having a great little boogie to Elemeno P, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Evermore, and Bon Jovi covers, which reminded me of how The Lads had closed out Parachute back in 2003.
After Late 80s left the stage the MCs came out for the last time and gave away all their left over CDs and T-Shirts. I managed to score a Casting Crowns live DVD after the case separated in mid-air and I caught part of it and other people handled me the rest of the broken case.
The trip back to Auckland was good, traffic wasn’t that bad.
On the way back I decided to take my time and drive through Hamilton. They have built some new roads to handle the highway traffic with these epic two lane, five road round-a-bouts every so often, which I am sure will confuse everyone as they are not well signed posted and confusing. I almost ended up on the Raglan Road instead of State Highway one after getting into the wrong lane.
Just north of Te Rapa this awesome cloud formed in the sky (see below), I am still trying to find out what it was, but I believe it may be a Horizontal Arc, pretty much a reflection of the sun in very high cloud often seen in advance of a rain storm (it showed the next day).
Once I hit the Auckland Motorway the traffic became quite heavy and slow going, probably costing me around half an hour of extra time, but overall my trip back to Auckland was still faster than my trip down, taking around two hours ten minutes.
When I got home the cleaning began, until my washing machine decided to die on the third load, I think it got over hot or something, had to take a whole lot of wet clothes out of it and let them drip dry. Also I discovered I had a sunburnt hand…
It took a lot of V to get this tired face and body back to Auckland
And for another year Parachute was over, but this is not the last blog, the final one will a summary of thoughts on the weekend.
-7C in Whakatane? WTF?
Did someone put the thermometer in the freezer or something. And check out the windchill -15C and 7 layers of clothing needed… quite literally off the chart.
The Snow Storm Continues
Check out these two photos from the Mount Ruapehu website.
They are chairlifts buried in nearly four meters of snow. It is just nuts! I am hoping to go skiing again on the trip back up to Auckland.
Once in 10 year storm?
Now there is absolutely no denying that the storm that has hit us during the last two days has been particularly nasty, however, one thing that is getting to me is the way the media blow it up, and the way in which the general public then go into panic mode. I had a friend telling me that the motorway was closed and they shouldn’t be driving because there are slips and stuff. The irony here is that the motorway was never closed and the person couldn’t explain to me how you could get a slip in the middle of central Auckland where there are no hills to slip.
Coming back to the one in 10 year storm idea. Compare these two police media release pages. The first is for yesterday. The second is for July 10 2007. One year ago. Where we got hit by a very similar storm which took out power up here for two days. 48 hours. Not 3. And that was a year ago, not 10.
26 July 2008:
10 July 2007:
