Wintry blast

The shortest day of the year is upon us in the Southern Hemisphere. Auckland will have only 9 hours 38 minutes of daylight, but Invercargill—the world’s southernmost city—will receive only 8 hours 35 minutes of daylight.

Many people consider this the start of winter, but these days that’s generally considered to be June 1. As it happens, we’re about to get a wintry blast, courtesy of a storm system that recently lashed Australia’s New South Wales coast. The South Island will get the worst of it:

A cold and squally southwesterly wind flow from the polar ice-shelf is expected to shift on to the South Island today, bringing snow to mountains.

Here in generally milder Auckland, we’ve been told that later today we’ll have winds blasting us at 90 kph (roughly 56 mph), pushing already lower temperatures even lower. The wind chill is expected to be below freezing. Nice. The air temperature will be warmer than that, of course, but the heavy rain that’s also expected will probably make it feel cold and damp.

The worst weather is expected to hit Auckland tomorrow and Saturday. As luck would have it, those two days are also when we’re having the new heating/cooling system installed, so I’m hoping that we don’t have to disconnect the old system until they’re done. As luck would further have it, we’re waiting for a delivery of new gas bottles, since we’re about to run out of gas (it’s supposed to be delivered today).

Will be we be without heat tomorrow night? Will the weather be as bad as expected? Will South Island farmers get snowed in for two weeks again, like last year? And, what about Naomi? (that last one is an obscure American cultural reference; extra points to anyone who can tell me the source).

Send warm thoughts!

Update: The installation has been postponed (as they so often are) to Tuesday, so we'll definitely have heat.

Update 2 (23 June 2007): Well, if this is a wintry blast, I can cope. There was a little wind, but the temperatures were generally pretty mild in Auckland. We did, however, get more rain than usual. However, Otago in the South Island got hit hard; apparently they got the entire country's share of the winter weather. At any rate, Jason wins the extra points for getting the obscure cultural reference.