Frozen spring

New Zealand is getting hit by a “tropospheric polar vortex”, with Antarctic cold air described as coming from “the belly of the polar region”. Spring, eh? Gotta love it.

Snow to low elevations (even sea level) in the South Island was predicted, and, in fact, it’s started falling. Christchurch may see snow accumulate, the first time it’ll have happened since the 1960s.

Overall, heavy snow watches have been issued for much of the South Island and parts of the lower North Island. This won’t affect Hamilton, of course. The watches are in effect until Thursday.

A few days ago, it was 22 (71.6F) in Hamilton. Tomorrow, the high will be 10 degrees (53.6F), and that’s after dropping to 0 (32F) overnight tonight.

Just yesterday, I put my heat pump in the living area on cooling because the afternoon got hot, and that was after it had been off for a couple days. This evening I put it on heating again, because the temps had already dropped significantly.

This sort of frigid storm system in Spring is very, very rare. In the upper North Island, October is when we usually start seeing more very warm days (like yesterday, or a few days ago), mixed in with cooler days—but without the nighttime temperature dropping down to freezing (actually, I don’t remember that happening over the past 26+ years, but I could’ve forgotten it, I suppose—or just blocked it from my memory).

Seriously, though, I despise wintry weather, and have for decades. But I know hot summery weather is on the way, even if it may not seem like it right now.

The forecast video above is from NIWA (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research), a Crown Research Institute founded in 1992 to “enhance the economic value and sustainable management of New Zealand’s aquatic resources and environments, to provide understanding of climate and the atmosphere and increase resilience to weather and climate hazards to improve safety and wellbeing of New Zealanders.” I’ve noticed that a lot of the public-facing weather people at NIWA are North American. I have no idea why.