Source: NIWA
NIWA’s climate scientists can now confirm what you may have suspected. After carefully poring through more than a century’s worth of data, it has been officially determined that winter 2022 was Aotearoa New Zealand’s warmest and wettest on record.
The 2022 winter climate summary is attached.
Highlights:
– Three-peat: NZ just had its warmest winter on record, yet again – the country now has had 3 consecutive record warm winters
– The nationwide average temperature was 9.8°C (1.4°C above the 1981-2010 average)
– Of the 10 warmest winters on record, 6 have occurred since 2013
– Winter 2022 was the first on winter record where the temperature anomaly exceeded +1.2C for all three months of the season
– 84 locations experienced a record or near-record warm winter
– Our coastal seas also had their warmest winter on record with persistent marine heatwave conditions
– It has been our wettest winter on record due to numerous extreme rainfall events that resulted in severe flooding and slips across the country
– 42 locations experienced a record or near-record wet winter
– It snowed heavily in the South Island initially but this last everywhere; Aoraki/Mt Cook Village had its deepest snowpack on record (since 2010) in mid-July
– Ending on a brighter note, the sunniest four regions in 2022 (so far) are Taranaki (1701 hours), Bay of Plenty (1675 hours), Greater Nelson (1621 hours), Auckland (1564 hours)
