Hi Gina – There is a very simple fix to improving forecasts on the day in NZ – and that’s making the rain radar data openly available, as it is in other nations where our IBM forecast data is even more accurate.

In NZ two Government Agencies – MetService and NIWA – have *commercial* control over tax funded data and unlike Australia, USA, UK, Japan, Canada, we can’t freely put radar data into our freely public forecasts… basically the NZ Government clips the wings of our technology to keep the commercial power with MetService and NIWA. Yet another Government review into MetService and Niwa has recently been announced – but considering the last one from MBIE (which said NZ weather data is some of the most expensive and hard to access in the modern world) was totally ignored by the current Government we’re not holding our breath for change. The good news is that WeatherWatch has independently developed a new relationship with the MetService over the past couple years since the Commerce Commission stepped in and we’re now working on ways to use radar data for better alerting. It’s very frustrating to know the solution is there – is free to access in all modern nations – but is restricted here in NZ for Government ‘industry control’ over public forecast accuracy improvements. Hopefully a ‘watch this space’ as we work well now with MetService on future ideas with our new alerting app (which is getting closer to being released).

Simply put – NZ’s lack of freely open weather data means our forecasts lack vital real time and historical public data being included into our forecasting computer or AI (which learns from mistakes and radar is important to the ‘learning’ side of things). It’s painful that the NZ Government still doesn’t understand how this last century thinking over tax funded data will continually degrade the accuracy of ALL forecaster suppliers when tracking showers and rain ‘on the day’ – especially in light of unexpected flooding events this year on Jan27 in Auckland and Gabrielle on the eastern North Island. We hope the review does finally address this.

Kind regards
Philip Duncan

p.s. MetService has no super computer – so their radar isn’t being ingested into one. Niwa has a tax funded super computer – but due to the commercial issues between Niwa and MetService that means Niwa also can’t use rain radar freely – so that means the Government itself is also clipping their own wings by not using their own infrastructure and data sets openly and freely. Open data would instantly fix this issue for the Government itself – and improve all NZ forecasts around rain too. It’s truly quite crazy!

Hi Janet, hopefully we can get some of that high pressure from Aussie later in August and going into Sept – but this time of year it’s always hard to get a settled period of weather!
– PD