A downpour in Auckland caused some surface flooding in the city centre, causing surface flooding and road closures after the storm.

Heavy rain has flooded houses in Auckland and Waikato and blocked a road tonight.

PM John Key has today seen firsthand the damage wrought by the bad weather that has hammered Christchurch, telling flooded business owners to "hang in there".

'We're obviously going to review the sandbagging issue,' says Christchurch's mayor amid residents' complaints the council failed to handle yesterday's floods.

Clarendon Terrace resident Nicholas Wilson shows us his flooded street and Hamish Wright from Construction Contracting Limited discusses protecting homes in the community from further flooding.

Flood waters take over Christchurch suburbs.

Mick Dummer got a nasty shock when he arrived at work.

A brief deluge yesterday had central Dunedin on standby again as the mop-up continues from a storm on Monday that overwhelmed the city's stormwater system.

A flash storm that dropped hail stones the size of golf balls caught residents near Ashburton off guard last night.

Parts of Dunedin were flooded late yesterday afternoon when a thunderstorm struck, causing havoc for some central-city businesses.

The cost of extreme weather events in New Zealand this year is likely to top $100 million, the Insurance Council says.

Flooding has forced two more blocks of Wanganui residents from their homes, as the city deals with a state of emergency from a swollen Whanganui River.

A whitebaiter feared he was about to drown when a flash flood swamped his caravan and vehicle in the Taramakau River bed early this morning.

Days of rain and floods have transformed the outdoorsy mountain communities in Colorado's Rocky Mountain foothills affectionately known as the "Gore-Tex Vortex" from a paradise into a disaster area.

As people came down from the flooded foothills of the Colorado Rockies, they brought tales of dramatic rescues and heartbreaking loss.

Following on from the flooding in Europe, India and Canada are now both suffering from the loss of life and property.

Civil Defence and emergency services have urged New Zealanders to prepare for the worst as a ferocious polar blast bears down on the country.

MetService's website is back online after it went down due to a "hardware failure" yesterday.

Floodwaters have "scoured" rural roads across Otago, as the region struggles to cope with the aftermath of the worst flooding in decades.

Snow forecast for later this week will be just the icing on the cake for Wanaka skifields.

There will be a brief reprieve today for towns cleaning up from yesterday's floods as they prepare for the threat of "blizzard conditions" later this week.

Snow could reach as far north as Coromandel and the Kaimai Ranges later this week as a huge winter storm looks set to batter the country.

Another slip caused a home to be evacuated early this morning in the Tasman district, just 12 hours after a woman was killed in her house by a landslide.

Police have released the name of the woman who died when a landslide engulfed her home near Kaiteriteri yesterday afternoon.