Weather: The sun that warmed the country has ended, due to pack in this week

Name: WeatherWatch: Winter Ends This Week
Uploaded: 2016-08-29T12:03:53+12:00
Duration: 159 s
Description: High pressure dominates this week and that means more dry, settled weather is on the way. The last day of winter in the meteorological calendar is this Wednesday but it looks mainly calm, dry and mild for winter's last day and the start of spring on Thursday.

By Martin Johnston

Reporter·NZ Herald·

28 Aug, 2016 08:18 PM3 mins to read

High pressure dominates this week and that means more dry, settled weather is on the way. The last day of winter in the meteorological calendar is this Wednesday but it looks mainly calm, dry and mild for winter's last day and the start of spring on Thursday.

Hopefully you enjoyed yesterday's Sunday sunshine as the rest of the week is set to pack in.

Many people had the opportunity to get outside and make some vitamin D in their skin as the sun shone on much of the country and temperatures crept up to the mid-teens. The West Coast was the exception.

But from today, it's back to rain and showers for much of the upper North Island as a low swings through headed southeast.

And many mountain areas will get snow at times this week, showing that winter has plenty of bite left yet, despite September 1 - this Thursday - being widely considered the first day of spring.

The MetService is predicting a ridge of high pressure will spread over the country on Tuesday and Wednesday and this could bring blue skies to the North Island skifields.

But the ridge makes way for a cold front to sweep over the South Island late on Thursday and on Friday.

Yesterday, about 130 Auckland properties remained without hot water after Friday's overnight gales thrashed Vector's electricity network.

"Earlier today we had 300 [without hot water]," said a spokeswoman for the lines company, adding that repairs were being done as quickly as possible.

The company hoped to have fixed the hot-water-switching system serving all of the remaining 130 affected customers - mostly on the North Shore.

The spokeswoman said yesterday some people may still be without any power because of damage to lines from the street to a property, which are the responsibility of the property owner. She urged people in this situation to contact Vector.

As the storm tore through on Friday night and early Saturday morning, with gusts that exceeded 100km/h in exposed places, trees were blown over and power lines felled, cutting the electricity to thousands of homes and closing roads.

Beach Haven resident Kay Barnes said yesterday afternoon her hot water had been off since the storm and it was not good enough that it was taking so long to repair the system.

"I would think in this day and age it wouldn't be so Third World."