Good solid wind buffets north

Photo / Brett Phibbs

It's been a windy few days across Auckland and Northland. Cape Reinga has been hammered by winds averaging 85km/h with gusts over 100km/h. That's a good, solid, wind and is very typical to the outer regions of a high pressure system like the one we have over us now.

The set up is this: A very strong high to the east and low pressure to the west. The squeeze zone runs the length of the country, but mostly affects northern and western regions.

So what's in store this week? Well that high isn't really going anywhere for the start of the week. While it may drift to the east it's also going to build in strength...so really, for us, we won't notice a change until Thursday when the pressure starts to ease.

A low is then predicted to come down from the sub-tropics and swipe northern and north eastern parts of the North Island. Don't be too alarmed - the models look pretty weak at this stage. Elsewhere the South Island remains mostly calm and those warm days are just going to keep on coming for another week at least.

The weather in New Zealand remains relatively settled but overseas Typhoon Morakat has slammed Taiwan. Check out this amazing video of a six storey hotel collapsing into a raging river.

I was also researching more on Bill Gates' idea of controlling hurricanes - I found this blog from the Weather Channel in America by Senior Meteorologist Stu Ostro. He starts with "Yeah. And I can control tornadoes.

I have about one gazillionth the $ that Bill Gates does, but can all the money in the world control hurricanes?

The basic idea is to cool the water underneath tropical cyclones, depriving them of some of their energy source.

This isn't the first time an idea to control them has been proposed.

There are two problems with this cool idea...".

It's a very interesting read - you can find the entire blog here.

 Photo / Brett Phibbs