Wellington’s fickle weather: (Not) summer in the city
Tuesday, 27 January 2026
Do you have reckons on the weather? Yeah or meh? Have your say in the comments below.
If you’ve been thinking (and truthfully who hasn’t?) it’s been a “crap” summer in Wellington you are correct.
In fact even the experts are using the “c” word to describe the weather in the region over the last couple of months.
Thankfully we haven’t had the tropical deluges that the northern regions have been hit with - rainfall across December and January has been near normal - but temperature wise it’s a whole other story.
“Well below average,” says Earth Sciences meteorologist Chester Lampkin. As if we needed to be told.
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Along with most of the eastern areas of the country, the Wellington region had recorded less than 85% of its usual January sunshine.
Online forums have been awash with weather-related grumbles. “Wellington doesn't really have a summer season, we have slightly warmer and windier winters. The one official summer day is scheduled for during the working week, where everyone will say ‘you can't beat Wellington on a good day’.”
“I had my heat pump on the other day smdh (shaking my damn head),” said someone else.
Grey is the colour of, well, what was once blue sky, chilly is the clamber out of bed in the morning.
Lampkin, who hails from the US Midwest where summers are “too hot”, said rainfall in December 2024 had also been near normal, while temperatures were just “a little above normal.”
“But it looks like you guys had a crap January last year, and so far this year it hasn’t been flash either.”
Though there were a couple of warmish days a couple of weeks ago the sense that it had a been a long time since Wellington had experienced a truly good summer was undoubtedly a consequence of windy and rainy conditions lingering from spring, he said.
“My first summer in Wellington [2015/16] was amazing, and maybe that was the last really good summer. It was a stunner. You know, the whole Wellington on a good day. There were probably 80 good days that summer.”
But we wouldn’t want Midwest summers.
“Summer here is far superior to summer in the Midwest,” Lampkin reckons. “One of the things about New Zealand is even though we do get extreme weather, even though we can still have extreme temperatures, extreme rain, extreme drought, the extremes tend to be muted.
”They tend to be smaller in comparison to continental climates like you see across the ditch in Australia or you see in Europe, or you see in North and South America and Asia. So we do have that going for us, but because we are surrounded by water, because we are in the roaring 40s, we do have a lot of wind, and we can get heavy rain events.
“Even light rain events, and those can be enough to ruin your summer, like in Wellington. You know, it may not be a record-setting summer with rain, but just enough to just say, oh gosh I need to get away somewhere where there’s actually a summer.”
Having said that he was quick to also point out that a meteorological summer in New Zealand runs from December through January and February, meaning there was still time for some better weather‒potentially into March.
Forecasting suggests that February might bring near-normal amounts of rain and generally warmer-than-normal temperatures, though the weather may remain variable due to La Niña influences.
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