Summersetting uptobea real scorcher

Break out the barbecue and take out your togs if you haven’t already, because summer is shaping up to be a scorcher.

On the downside some water restrictions in Tasman are set to kick in next week. The region’s temperatures have gone above 20 degrees Celsius for 12 days running, and show no signs of cooling off, according to Metservice forecasts.

Niwa meteorologist Seth Carrier said this weather is thanks to a La Nin˜a-like weather pattern, which brings warm sea-surface temperatures, as well as highpressure and low rainfall to the South Island in particular.

Carrier said it was too early to tell if this summer was likely to be a record-breaker, but its seasonal forecast suggests that Nelson was very likely to have a drier and warmer than average summer.

Sea-surface temperatures around the South Island are on average 1-3 degrees above normal, with some pockets off the West Coast reaching as high as 6C warmer than normal.

Carrier said ‘‘sea surface temperatures were quite anomalously warm for this time of year’’. ‘‘Being an island country, the surrounding water temperatures have a very large effect on New Zealand’s weather, that’s one of the reasons temperatures have been so warm recently,’’ he said.

The hot sea is keeping temperatures up, while the high pressure associated with La Nin˜a keeps rainfall low.

‘‘The primary reason we’ve has some quite dry weather recently is we’re becoming more of a La Nin˜a pattern, which has certainly been the case for the last three or four weeks at least.’’

Nelson had 25mm of rainfall last month, just a third of the usual 78mm.

‘‘Early 2017 was actually quite wet for a lot of places in NZ, so this dry trend is a quite recent thing,’’ he said.

Carrier said generally El Nin˜o and La Nin˜a don’t follow a regular pattern. On average they tend to happen every three to seven years, but ‘‘that’s not set in stone’’.

He said that the weather now was ‘‘right at the brink’’ of what would be considered an official La Nin˜a, and New Zealand was experiencing ‘‘significant’’ weather effects associated with the pattern.

The Tasman District Council (TDC) Dry Weather Taskforce had its