Special early edition — Wind chills across both islands over the next 14 days will be severe at times in alpine areas and brutal for newborn animals right down to sea level in some areas.

Open weather data out of the US Government for New Zealand shows wind chills of -25 for the mountains and -5 to -15 for some exposed farming communities in the South Island and central North Island and WeatherWatch.co.nz is currently exclusively displaying this data here. (Similar data by either of New Zealand’s two tax funded government forecasters is reserved/sold to corporations and is not freely available to display).

Please note this US data is a bit pixelated, but the blue shading extends and fades out around the coastal areas/lower elevations, although Southland and Otago will be especially exposed.

With early spring conditions this year many farmers are already into lambing and calving – and we wish you all the best over the coming cold days. We’ll do our best to keep you up to update with news, videos, animations and infographics to help you out – and remember MetService has all the latest public snow fall warnings & watches, so be sure to check those out too.

Finally – WeatherWatch.co.nz now has 1500 forecast locations in New Zealand, you may find the temperatures and forecasts very localised and helpful to you, please do check them out and let us know after the event how accurate you found these new 10 day community and rural NZ forecasts. They are available on our website homepage and app – and remember we have the “find my location” option if your local area isn’t there, and we’ll find somewhere very close instead.

Here’s the animated wind chill map for New Zealand for the next 336 hours (14 days).  Dates & Times in animation GMT – simply ADD 12 hours to convert to NZ time.

– Wunderground/US Govt

– WeatherWatch.co.nz