Heavy rain for some during weekend

A friend of mine at work today sent me an email with sample paintings from a Japanese artist. She is fascinated by his art and passionately loves to create her own art which I think is equally as amazing. I've always wanted to draw but when I took art classes at high school my teacher (who was also the only teacher to ever give me a detention - and it was for chewing my gums...not gum, my actual gums...he thought I had gum in my mouth and had swallowed it. I hadn't. Sometimes I wish I could go back to school at my age now just to argue with people like him). Anyway, I took this art class and we had to draw our hands... he hated my drawing because instead of it fading out as it got to my wrist I drew it as if my hand had been cut off. My idea seemed to make more sense...a hand doesn't just stop it grows into your arm and I didn't know how to fade it out. I tried to draw a picture of a girl I liked at high school once...she came out looking like Shrek's girlfriend. The reason for the story about art is because I replied to her email with a satellite map of the storm in the northern Tasman Sea and said "Here's my art". Just like my art teacher at school she didn't think much of it - and to be fair it wasn't a very artistic satellite image. From space this low isn't magnificent to look at it...it's a relatively small blob of cloud. But what does look amazing is the weather map of it.

This is what MetService predicted the low would look like at 6am today. It's what I call a 'beautiful' low...it's perfectly shaped and the isobars are circular not all squashed on one side. It's funny timing that I was talking art today as yesterday I spoke to Bob McDavitt at MetService about this particular low. While we discussed our own personal thoughts on the track of the low Bob mentioned a map he saw the other day where the clouds were spiralling into a low and it looked, well, quite beautiful. They are actually rare, a perfectly shaped low with clouds circling around the centre perfectly creating a hypnotic shape when animated. A couple of years ago was the last time I saw one in our neck of the woods. It was a deep low off Tasmania and the clouds were being sucked into the centre from hundreds of kilometres away. I had a guy at ZM animate it for me and it was quite weird to watch as we sped up 12 hours into 3 seconds. It really did look like one of those spirals they use to hypnotise people.

Of course it's not just our planet... Voyager 1 captured this photo of the Great Red Spot and surrounding clouds when it flew by Jupiter in 1979. 

Speaking of the weather on Jupiter the big red spot is getting smaller. The big spot is, in fact, an ancient monster storm that is 3 times the size of earth! CNN had an article about this recently.

Back to planet earth and more specifically New Zealand. Our artistic, intense, low is moving down the Tasman Sea. It's going to track southwards and just brush the Fiordland coast in the weekend - bringing 8 metre swells off shore. Heavy rain is likely to affect the northern and western extremities of both islands. Anzac services will probably be dry, cloudy, windy and mild for many places but rain is likely in Northland and the West Coast. Elsewhere will see showers or showers eventually developing. Fingers crossed the rain holds off for most people until at least after sunrise.

Philip Duncan

Weather chart. Image / Supplied