The country's coolest little capital living up to its name
Tuesday, 7 January 2025
It has definitely not been Wellington on a Good Day. Join the conversation in the comments below.
Wellington, you have officially been been short-changed weather-wise, at least for the last week or so.
As one Post reader put it in a letter to the editor, January has (so far) been “one day of feeble sunshine followed by yet another week of grey, sunless, wet, cold southerly weather… appalling”.
The summary was spot on, according to Niwa forecaster Chris Brandolino. January has had an average mean daytime temperature across Wellington 5C to 6C cooler than normal.
“And, as most people could attest, that’s unusually chilly.”
Night-time temperatures have also been down, just not to the same extent. “The overnight temperatures have also been cooler than average, but not nearly as profound, so about 1.3C to 1.4C degrees cooler than average.
“When you combine the two, the overall mean for the Wellington area for the first four days of the year in January is running about 1.5C to 2C degrees cooler than average.”
Still, Wellington’s typical January maximum is hardly tropical, sitting at between 20C and 21C.
Brandolino is sympathetic to those optimistic souls not wanting to give up the shorts and jandals as wind chill turns that maximum into something more in line with May’s “heat”.
“People are on holiday, they want to go to the beach, they want to be outside, have a picnic. But then it’s hailing, there’s a gale from the south, it’s 15 degrees and there are showers. I mean, clearly, that’s not beach weather”.
December in the capital was, according to the experts warmer than usual. Not warmer in the rest of the country warmer, maybe, but warmer in a colloquial sense, hence the region’s average mean temperature for the last month of last year was a raging 1.5 to 2C up on the norm.
“It's been unusually chilly,” says Brandolino. “There's no sugar coating that… But that's coincided with the peak holiday period. Not only was December warmer than usual in Wellington, but it was a very warm December countrywide. It was the fifth warmest December on record, as a whole, for New Zealand.”
Canterbury University physics professor and a former Climate Change Research Institute director Dave Frame has been on holiday in Nelson, where, he says it rained a bit but was still warm enough to bask in the still, warm waters of Tahunanui Beach. Meanwhile “just 80 miles away in Wellington there were 6m swells and days of filthy weather”.
As if we needed reminding.
Frame likens Wellington to the southern city once described by one of the Rolling Stones in distinctly unflattering terms.
“The basic reason Wellington gets some terrible weather is because it is very open to the south, and the fronts that bring the cold weather are usually from the south and west. It's a lot like Invercargill like this, just a bit further north.
“New Zealand is basically about a thousand miles of mountains with a gap in the middle‒where Wellington is‒and if there's any sort of pressure difference across that gap then the wind basically blows along that pressure gradient.
“So if the pressure is higher in Whanganui than it is in Kaikoura, which it often is, then you get a northerly; it the pressure is higher in Kaikoura than in Whanganui, then it's a southerly. Only occasionally, when the pressures are roughly the same across that whole area, do you get calm weather.”
Wellington’s terrible climate (his words) is the result of the local geography and the fact the country perches on the northern edge of the world's angriest storm track‒the Roaring Forties/Furious Fifties.
Climate change, while likely to make some extremes, such as drought and rainfall, more intense around the country, won’t “fundamentally alter any of this,” Frame says.
“About 25 years ago a bunch of us in Treasury were looking out in December at a dark, bleak sky and horizontal rain. It was basically lights-on dark at 4pm. And one of my colleagues made the point that it was a very stupid place to have built a city but that it would have been a hell of a good national park. I think that pretty much sums it up.”
Meanwhile the un-balminess of the region’s weather could have had at least one positive effect; a report from Surf Life Saving New Zealand notes a very quiet weekend for its central region, with no rescues or calls for assistance for crew patrolling beaches from Hawke’s Bay and Taranaki south to Wellington.
Brandolino is picking today will be the best and warmest of the week. “The temperatures will be sub par but at least the wind will ease”.
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