They have not been the hoped-for, hazy days of New Zealand summer. Auckland’s beaches were slapped with no-swim warnings as the overwhelmed stormwater system pumped sewage into the harbours. Hopeful glances at weather apps were met with uniform lines of grey storm clouds. On the roads to some popular northern holiday spots, sinkholes opened up after the rain, sending the promise of sunshiney beach days circling the drain alongside the silt and stormwater.
“Seasonal affective disorder gonna have to be renamed living in New Zealand affective disorder,” one person tweeted, as clouds and thunderstorms rolled over the North Island.
“A sorry start to summer,” declared television channel Newshub. An even sorrier period followed, as Cyclone Hale tore over the eastern coast and holidaymakers packed away their tents and sunhats, cramming the northern motorways on early trips home.
For many New Zealanders, the weeks that form the country’s treasured post-Christmas summer holidays were marked by ceaseless rain.
“We’re going to be in for a rough ride this January,” national forecaster Metservice said as the procession of storms continued. By mid-January, Auckland – home to more than a third of New Zealand’s population – had only had about 26 hours of bright sunshine for the entire month, just 28% of the usual amount. Across the entire North Island and top of the South, sunshine hours were well below average.
“So much rain – you wake up and it’s raining, then it hits again,” says Colin, an Aucklander who works in parks and landscaping, “We haven’t had a lot of sunlight.”
He was driving from Auckland toward Cambridge for a summer mini break when the tail end of Cyclone Hale hit. “The heavens just opened up – it was like a deluge of biblical proportions. I’ve never seen that,” he says. The family watched as floods accumulated along the motorway, and spent the next day of their holiday trudging around Hobbiton in the rain.
The conditions came as an unpleasant surprise to those who returned from the northern hemisphere for a taste of New Zealand summer – especially after several years in which the country was closed by Covid restrictions.
“My return to NZ after 22 years away … has me hoping for much better summers!” said Dr Paula Lorgelly, a health economist at Auckland University.
While much of the country accepted the unusually soggy season as an unwelcome anomaly, the weather conditions could give a taste of broader, longer term trends in New Zealand’s weather. This year a La Niña weather pattern, carrying warmer, damper winds from the north-east has aided the heavy northern rain and the arrival of cyclones. But as the climate crisis continues, scientists say seasons and regions are likely to fluctuate more wildly between drought and deluge, the light patter of summer rains increasingly replaced by more destructive, erratic dumps of water from the sky.
In January, atmospheric science body NIWA announced that 2022 was New Zealand’s hottest year on record, and its eighth most “unusually wet” year – a metric that measures how much each region’s rainfall diverges from the norm. Those two measures – hotness and wetness – are intertwined, says NIWA meteorologist Chris Brandolino. As temperatures rise, more water evaporates into vapour, bringing heavier downpours when the clouds break.
“The analogy I like to use is binge rainfall,” says Brandolino – the atmospheric version of consuming an entire season of Netflix in a single day. The past year’s “unusually wet” status mimics that trend, Brandolino says.
“Over a year, you may average it out and [the rains] don’t look too abnormal. But when you look at the individual events to help you get to that final number at the end of the year, you say, ‘Oh, wow.’”
The soggy summer holiday season has not been felt universally across New Zealand: in the less populous South Island, rainfall in some areas has been well below average, with moisture deficits of up to 130mm.
However, across the year, New Zealand saw more rain falling in areas that were typically dry, including a one-in-120-year rain event west of Nelson, where nearly 700mm of rain fell in a month – four times the usual. When the rain hits places unprepared for regular flooding, that can bring catastrophic damage.
‘Monsoon-rain swimming ecstasy’
Some are embracing the downpours: surfers have taken to the swollen rivers, and newspapers have run features on what to do in summer holidays when it’s raining.
“To the bemusement of my co-holidaymakers, I have been in monsoon-rain swimming ecstasy because of nostalgia for tropical childhood holidays,” said Auckland researcher Tze Ming Mok. The smell and feel of the summer increasingly reminded her of Singapore: “a misleadingly comforting side-effect of catastrophic climate change”.
But for many New Zealanders, the prospect of long-term changes to New Zealand’s summers is not a welcome one. Working outdoors as a landscaper, Colin says the extremes become clearer as the years go by.
“We used to have periods [over summer] where it was mild and you could go out and do stuff … [now] there are the days where it’s stupidly hot and the days where it just pours down.”
When it isn’t raining, he says, “You feel like you’re cooking.”
