Auckland weather dry spell: First week of sunny weather in months

Fine weather is forecast for the coming week in Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell

Auckland is set to get its first stretch of fine weather since early March.

There is almost no rain forecast for the region for the next eight days, except for possible showers in northern parts of Auckland on Monday, according to the MetService website.

MetService meteorologist Alain Baillie said there had been a change in the overall weather pattern and wind direction.

“The winds are far more westerly, which is far better for Auckland than the north-easterlies we’ve been having”.

North-easterly winds come from the tropics where air tends to be warmer. Warmer air can hold more water and often means higher rainfall.

However, forecasts as far as eight days out could change.

A Herald analysis of rainfall data from Auckland Airport, the main station used by MetService to record Auckland’s weather, shows this would be the third time in the past year with seven consecutive days of no rain recorded.

The most recent seven-day streak of fine weather and no rain was March 3-9 this year.

Prior to that, there were seven-day streaks of clear weather in late October and early April last year.

The break from the rain comes after Auckland was drenched with nearly an entire year’s rainfall in less than five months.

Much of this extra rain came from one-off extreme events, including the one-in-200-year Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods that damaged thousands of properties, overwhelmed emergency services and killed four people.

A whopping 280mm fell on Albert Park on January 27 - 211mm of that in under six hours.

A man tries to clear the drain outside his house in Greenlane during the worst flooding the Auckland region has ever experienced. Photo / Dean Purcell

Weather data from the Auckland Airport weather station showed 1018.6mm of rain fell there between the start of the year and late May, just over 90 per cent of the annual average.

Unsurprisingly, Aucklanders have seen less than the normal amount of bright sunshine since the start of the year.

Niwa meteorologist Ben Noll said there had been 864 hours of sunshine recorded from January to May, 100 hours less than the average – 963 – for the first five months of the year.

“It’s enough to notice,” Noll said.

“It was very cloudy in the beginning part of the year; we did make up for the sunshine in March.”