Weather Watch: Sunny weekend ahead

Kids can rejoice as the weather clears in time for the weekend. Photo / Christine Cornege

Weather for the school holidays has been fairly good across the country, despite the current rain warnings in the west.

However, next week should be rain free as a very large high moves in. The high is going to spread in from Australia and give us not only a fantastic weekend but most likely all of next week should be sunny and dry too.

Not to mention warm. Daytime highs for everyone should be from the late teens to low, even mid, 20s.

Towards the end of next week an approaching low in the Southern Ocean should see the nor'westers developing so that will mean even hotter weather in the east.

It's hard to believe a week ago Southlanders were still shivering with wind chills below zero and gale force winds were hammering the region with gusts to 110km/h. Gusts of the same speed were also hitting Auckland.

As I type this right now, on Wednesday afternoon, it's a little over 20 degrees in Auckland with almost no wind, while Invercargill has 14. On Tuesday evening Invercargill was on 17 degrees at 7pm. Not bad at all.

As I mentioned before there are some rain warnings in force at the moment. Most at threat appears to be parts of Waikato where river levels are already running very high. The fear over the next few days is that more heavy rain, especially upstream, could cause serious problems. It will be a wait and see game and I'm sure an anxious time for some. Here's hoping it doesn't eventuate.

The great news is that as this high starts to move in the rivers should start to lower gradually. I don't see any rain in the forecast for Waikato from this Saturday to at least next Thursday. Here's hoping the computer models are accurate and that high stays put over the North Island until at least next weekend.

Finally - don't forget about burn times. At this time of year it can be easy to think the sun doesn't have much oomph - but it does. Burn times for fair skinned people could be less than 15 minutes and even if you don't burn the sun's radiation levels are still high enough to start causing damage to your skin.

Get into summer mode now when it comes to skin care - because skin cancer cases in this country remain far too high.

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