Apologies for not renewing the Photograph of the Week for such a long time. I have been receiving comments from colleagues, 'Photograph of the Month is it?.....' and now even 'Photograph of the Year?.....'; I thought that was a bit cruel.

My excuse....., I blame a heavy workload...., ....don't we all?

The good news is that I have received some very nice photographs over the past couple of months - I haven't had the chance to sort through them all yet but plan to do so in the next few days.

In the meantime we would be very happy to receive photographs of the adverse weather of the past few days.

Perhaps this feature should be called 'Movie of the Week' as I have included a short animation of satellite imagery for the period 10-13 June 2006. It graphically shows the huge depression that crossed the country during this period and the subsequent southerly flow over most of New Zealand. The animation is in the form of a Quicktime movie. The file size is 696 kBytes. It has been tested on Apple Macs and Windows PCs which have the appropriate Quicktime players.

Click thumbnail or here to view 10-13 June 2006 movie.

Also, for people with Broadband connections - can you remember what your weather was like in January 2006? We have produced a similar movie to the one described above, but for the whole month of January. It plays at 8 frames per second and lasts for 1 minute 32 secs. File size is 5.4 Mbytes but it shows a very nice sequence of January cloud patterns.

Click thumbnail or here to view 1-31 January 2006 movie. It will take a minute or so to load if you are on a broadband connection.

Please let us have your feedback, if there is sufficient interest in these Quicktime movies we will consider the possibility of publishing more in the future.

This shows the pressure at South Island sites at 12:00 on 15 June 2006, the red traces show the pressure trace over the previous four days. These traces show the passge of the low over the country. The centre of the low passed over the West Coast of the South Island around 09:00 on 12 June 2006. It passed over the Chatham Islands some 12 to 15 hours later.

Tuesday 7 August 2007

In the past two or three days we have experienced some hardware issues on our main web server. This caused some loss of service over the weekend. We apologise for this. The faulty hardware has now been replaced and we are hoping that our service will run without any further interuptions. Many thanks for all the emails of support.

Wednesday 16 May 2007

We have been informed that there has been a major power failure on the NCEP data servers in the United States - this is affecting the update of our forecasts. We are currently looking to obtain this data from other sources and hope to be able to update our forecasts by 13:00 today.

Thursday 10 May 2007

Earlier today our Internet Service Provider was the target of a major distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). This caused a serious drop down in connection speed and loss of connectivity. Consequently we were unable to update a number of our services such as forecast weather maps. We regret this inconvenience but sadly this was beyond our control. We are hopeful that our normal service will gradually return to normal.

Monday 23 April 2007

If you are following the Americas Cup Racing or sailing around the western Mediterranean Sea we have added wind and rain forecast maps for the region. Many thanks to Chad at New Zealand Classic Yachts for the suggestion. Click here for maps.

Saturday 7 April 2007

Added new navigation bars on forecast thumbnail pages. Have also enabled users to decide how many days of forecasts they require. This ought to be particularly useful to people on low bandwidth connections.

Wednesday 28 March 2007

Recently we have been experiencing some problems with our forecasts of the upper level winds. We are pleased to report that this has been fixed and charts should now update normally.

Wednesday 8 November 2006

Current New Zealand Weather maps have been restored.

Monday 6 November 2006

We are experiencing problems with the computer that generates current New Zealand Weather maps, we are working on fixing this problem as quickly as possible.

Thursday 20 July 2006

Forecast maps are now updating normally.

Monday 17 July 2006

Due to operational computer maintenance at NCEP, forecast maps will not be updated for a 48-hour period from 1800 NZST Monday 17 July 2006.

Monday 12 June 2006

There has been a delay in updating the latest weather forecasts and the satellite images. The cause has been identified and our computers are now working at full rate to bring everything up to date as quickly as possible. We anticipate a normal service later this morning. Thanks for all the supportive emails.

Thursday 20 April 2006

Since the upgrade of Auckland Weather Radar on 7 April 2006 the spurious radar returns which were discussed in the 15 March 2006 announcement appear to have disappeared from the radar scans and are thus no longer a problem - feedback on this matter would be welcome.

Friday 7 April 2006

Auckland Weather Radar is back from 18:00 NZST 7 April 2006 following an upgrade of the system.

Wednesday 15 March 2006

A number of people have written regarding the weather radar data, noticing that under certain circumstances weather radars appear to signify rain when no rain is falling. There are a number of reasons for spurious and misleading radar returns and usually, with some experience, these can be easily recognised. Ground clutter, anomalous propagation and other false echoes are often but not always corrected for in computer software and problems can remain. For example Auckland Weather Radar can sometimes show a radar return from the Coromandel at times when the satellite images suggest the skies are cloud free. A Google search for 'weather radar clutter' will point to a variety of interesting sites which discuss such issues.

Wednesday evening 8 March 2006

Forecast pages are now updating normally.

Wednesday 8 March 2006

Delay in updating MetVUW weather forecasts - our weather forecasts are based on data from the NOAA/NESDIS weather server. The data on this server has not been updated since 0000 GMT (1300 NZDT) Tuesday 7 March 2006. This is outside our control, however we will be updating our forecasts at the earliest opportunity, and apologise for any inconvenience this might cause.

Wednesday 1 March 2006

A number of people have written asking for an explanation of the wind symbols which are displayed on the forecast page. This can be found on the plots of current wind displayed here.

Wednesday 25 January 2006

There was a bug which produced a discrepancy in the dates of the Upper Level Wind forecasts. The date on the full-size plots differed to the date on thumbnails (which was correct). This bug has now been fixed and Upper Level Wind forecast charts issued after and including 00:00 GMT on 25 January 2006 will be free of this discrepancy. Thanks to the gliding guys at Omarama for bringing this to my attention and Good Luck with the Grand Prix.

Tuesday 6 December 2005

Wellington Weather Radar is currently being upgraded. There will be no images from this radar for the next two to three days.

Monday 5 December 2005

Welcome to MetVUW.com to readers of Yachting Monthly. Following a request from a number of sailors, weather maps of mslp, surface winds and accumulated rainfall for the North and South Atlantic have been added to our Ocean Weather Service.

Thursday 20 October 2005

A new navigation bar has been added to assist our New Zealand Users zoom in and out on the forecast charts without having to go back to the thumbnails. This will help users to look at the overview situation map and then zoom into the area of interest for more detail.

Wednesday 19 October 2005

We have added two new maps of rain and wind for both the North and South Island. The new maps show 10-metre winds at every 1° of latitude and longitude instead of the usual 2°. The isobars are also plotted for every hectopascal (hPa).

Click on North Island maps or South Island maps.

1400 NZST Tuesday 27 September 2005

Our weather forecasts are again being updated every six hours. Black lines on some plots signify that data are not available for these forecast times.

VUW are carrying out some major work on their computer networks. This will affect some of our services for about six hours this evening, namely the satellite imagery and weather radar service.

1800 NZST Monday 26 September 2005

Our weather forecasts are based on GFS data from the NOAA/NESDIS weather server. The data on this server has not been updated since 0600 GMT (1800 NZST) Sunday 25 September 2005. We do not know how long this situation will prevail, we will however be updating our forecasts at the earliest opportunity.

Tuesday 20 September 2005

Several people (including James' daughter) have sent us a collection of photographs which were purportedly of Hurricane Katrina. Although these are quite spectacular we believe they are fakes as these photos were circulating several weeks before Hurricane Katrina occurred. As such we have decided not to reproduce them on the MetVUW site.

For publication in the Photograph of the Week feature our preference is for photographs from identified photographers with as much shooting and weather information as possible. However we will continue to consider any interesting weather-related photographs that are submitted to MetVUW.

Saturday 27 August 2005

A new navigation bar has been added to all the forecast pages this will enable users to step backwards and forwards through the full-sized plots, by 6, 12 18 or 24 hours, without having to go back to the thumbnails each time.

Friday 26 August 2005

The date and time stamp on the New Zealand upper air tephigrams has been fixed.

Friday 19 August 2005

We have reinstated our forecasts for europe and world views and tidied up our menu bar.

Also following a number of requests from our Australian users we have now included Australian weather forecasts for the west and south-east parts of Australia. These include the surface winds.

We have decided to discontinue our fleetcode weather map service, though this has been replaced by ocean weather forecast charts of mslp, wind and rain for the sea area between New Zealand and Fiji. These can be found here. Please do not use these charts without first reading our comments on forecast reliability and our disclaimer here.

Wednesday 17 August 2005