Weather Video: Cyclone Gita’s precise track to NZ still not locked in
14/02/2018 10:40pm
> From the WeatherWatch archives
Severe Tropical Cyclone Gita is closing in on eastern New Caledonia then it will move out into the Tasman Sea this weekend before curving around to New Zealand next week.
The storm will likely bring rain heavy enough for flooding in the New Zealand area but the computer modelling still isn’t on the same page about timing, exact location and intensity.
Gita could arrive in New Zealand as early as Monday and as late as Thursday next week.
We show you the latest models and compare GFS out of America to ECMWF out of Europe to see what they are showing next week. Meanwhile the upper North Island has a break in the rain for the next two days with mostly sunny and dry weather after a very wet past couple of weeks.
**PLEASE NOTE – since recording this the last slide we show you in this video from GFS (for next Wednesday) has changed, they are now showing a Tuesday or Wednesday landfall similar to ECWMF. We’ll still need another day or two to lock in.
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Before you add a new comment, take note this story was published on 14 Feb 2018.
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Tony Hastings on 15/02/2018 1:46am
Thank you for the latest video Philip. As always, very interesting and informative. I am rather curious. How many models do you use, or at least keep an eye on? Are any of them available to casual watchers?
Kind regards
Tony Hastings. Ngaio, Wellington.
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WW Forecast Team on 15/02/2018 1:58am
Hi Tony. We heavily rely on ECWMF and GFS as they both take into consideration numerous models and we know their strengths and weaknesses which is half the battle. On top of that we check in on the Canadian and Australian ones also. Plus IBM’s Watson Super Computer which proved to be bang on for Hurricane Irma is taking into account all available data on the internet to churn out forecasts and maps for us – some of which we share in news stories. We pay to have access to the maps we use in our videos – and our license doesn’t allow us sharing, other than in news stories. There’s quite a cool website here which shows the various models and their plots for this storm: https://www.cyclocane.com/gita-spaghetti-models/
On our maps page we provide a link to ECMWF. In the future we aim to share more of these maps as our licenses change and grow. Also our new business partnership with IBM means we can share more data – we just need a few more resources to be able to do this, which we’re currently working on.
Cheers
Phil
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