Weather watch: A typical winter

This is your typical winter set up now. Frosty conditions south of Auckland, wet underfoot everywhere and most trees have now lost their leaves, except from about Waikato northwards.

Temperatures have been fluctuating wildly lately. On Sunday night it was incredibly warm in the upper North Island - in fact 19 degrees at midnight in parts of Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Coromandel Peninsula. That is actually very similar to what we'd expect in the middle of summer.

At the same time in the deep south it was snowing. That shows you the size of the low that has affected our weather since Sunday - the top of the low was far enough north to pull down warm, sub-tropical air, while the bottom of the low scooped up cold air from the Southern Ocean and deposited it over the South Island - and eventually brought us the first wintry snap of 2010 this week.

I use the word 'snap' as it wasn't really a 'blast'. It's semantics really but in my head a snap is quicker than a blast. On the scale of things the wintry snap was short lived though and didn't affect all of New Zealand.

Wellington had hail, gales and even a touch of snow in Karori according to one WeatherWatch.co.nz reader. That's a pretty sure sign that winter has arrived!

Hail was reported from Dunedin to Palmerston North yesterday too and temperatures dipped well into the negatives in Central Otago... I'd say -8 was quite likely in some pockets, unfortunately away from our automatic weather observations.

So what's on the way now? Well now we're finally sliding into a typical winter weather set up - south westerlies.

On Thursday a cold front will surge up from the lower Tasman Sea and spread rain across western areas from the West Coast to Northland on Thursday afternoon, evening, or overnight.

The good news is, for now, that areas recently flooded are least likely to see heavy rain from this system. It's nice to have the attention shift to the west coast of New Zealand to help balance things out.

Finally, a quick look to the weekend shows showery weather in the west, including Auckland, with west to south west winds making conditions feel colder and more wintry. It's not going to be extreme, but just enough to make us all realise that the golden months of Autumn are now well and truly locked away behind us.