After the violent wind storm last week Aucklanders have asked why they weren’t properly warned of the event. MetService did have language about gales ahead of the storm but you can certainly argue their language was fairly stock standard, wording we’d all seen before many times with little to no damage or problems.

However WeatherWatch.co.nz actually defended MetService last week after comments by the State forecaster about the public not hearing their forecasts. So why didn’t people hear the “official” message from the New Zealand Government’s forecaster? Simple – we now have two official voices with two different messages. MetService is now competing against another Government agency, NIWA, for storm headlines.

NIWA is a Crown Research Institute and only recently started a commercial forecasting division to compete head on with MetService – another Government agency. This was allowed under the National Government in 2013 after being prohibited by all other previous Governments dating back to 1991. Prohibited because having two Government weather forecasters would likely cause confusion.

NIWA is aggressively on social media and loves big headlines – this year predicting a 40 degree heat wave that never eventuated, for example. NIWA also tends to have a bad habit of calling general lows “storms” and don’t appear to have a big grasp of local weather conditions, perhaps due to their forecast team coming from overseas. NIWA and MetService combined get over 150 million dollars of tax funding each and every year (and don’t always even pay the Government a dividend) and now NIWA and MetService commercially compete in the exact same space. Former Senior Minister Steven Joyce once told WeatherWatch.co.nz this set up appeared to be “muddying the waters” and lead to the independent MBIE review which National then stalled releasing for nearly a year and now this current Labour Government is delaying for another year on actioning anything in it. 

The mainstream media in New Zealand has fewer staff and lower budgets than a decade ago so another Government Agency providing them with flash tax funded weather graphics and big headlines (as it’s more ‘official’ than the private sector) guarantees major headlines in all news outlets each and every time. The media rarely if ever question why NIWA and MetService compete against each other – they just use them both. So you’ll now usually see both NIWA and MetService (two Government agencies) being quoted side by side about weather forecasts. This happens no where else on earth.

So when MetService said last week to the New Zealand Herald “Apart from going around knocking door to door, there is not much more we could have done [to get our message out]” we push back saying there is a LOT more that could be done – starting with MetService leading the charge to work with the Government to stop NIWA weakening MetService’s own tax funded warnings and competing against them. Our entire population is lower than Sydney’s yet we have two Government owned commercial forecasters competing in the same space.

No other country on earth has two Government forecasters, let alone two aggressive commercial ones, but New Zealand does – and we wonder why the “official” messaging is now getting diluted and lost.

– By WeatherWatch.co.nz head forecaster Philip Duncan