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Our competing weather agencies may have put lives at risk, so can Niwa & MetService now play nicely?

By Paul Gorman
Contributing writer·New Zealand Listener·
21 mins to read


If New Zealand has anything in excess, it’s weather. And taxpayer-funded weather forecasting agencies. Our mid-ocean, mid-latitudes location, narrow island geography and mountains-to-plains topography bring often predictable fronts of rain, droughts, blasts of polar air, heat and everything in between, from the sub-tropical north to the sometimes snow-covered south. It can blow like crazy and we’re buffeted by swells and storms.

There’s a surfeit of “weather”, and with climate change bringing devastation such as that caused by Cyclone Gabrielle and

Raining confusion

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