A south west flow is currently spreading across many parts of New Zealand, bringing cloud and a few light showers to some in the west and south and cooler air continues to spread over both islands.

By late Tuesday and into Wednesday high pressure pushes in from Australia bringing mainly dry weather across our country – light winds too.

However later into Wednesday and through Thursday rain will return to the West Coast (a day earlier than we predicted last week) and will slide up to the North Island later on Thursday and into early Friday.

The weekend ahead also looks changeable with potentially a small low near northern New Zealand, which could affect the forecast for regions north of Waikato and Bay of Plenty…doesn’t look too nasty at this stage, but it’s just one to watch due to it’s possible location.

However long range global computer models paint a very predictable picture:  Highs tracking eastwards over South Africa, the Indian Ocean, Australia and northern New Zealand – and lows tracking south of us all, in the Southern Ocean nearer to Antarctica.

This means each of these lows will have a cold front attached to them which will go further north than the lows – but these fronts will run into that belt of higher pressure further north (over Australia for example) and weaken.  This tends to limit how much rain falls in eastern and north eastern parts of New Zealand.  

This set up tends to create a lot of westerly weather – in other words fronts hit the West Coast then weaken as they head up the North Island’s west coast the following day, with air pressure often higher the further north you go in this current set up. High pressure usually weakens most fronts and rain bands.

After each front the winds turn cooler south west – meaning wet parts of western NZ may have more wet stuff to deal with yet.

So we have a mixture of weather coming for the rest of May – not too hot, not too cold – perhaps in the middle somewhere. Or put another way – typical weather for mid-Autumn in New Zealand.

WeatherWatch.co.nz does see the potential for some lower level severe weather warnings over the next two weeks – but generally speaking the weather ahead for the rest of May doesn’t look as severe as the weather was in the first half of the month.

– WeatherWatch.co.nz