Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Blenheim November’s sunniest town
Marlborough’s biggest town has been crowned New Zealand’s sunniest for November, but its sunshine hours probably won’t top Aotearoa for 2022.
Blenheim recorded 257.1 hours of sunshine last month, making it the sunniest since 2019. The town recorded 228.2 hours in November 2021 and 180 hours in November 2020.
However, New Plymouth was New Zealand’s sunniest town so far this year, recording 2361.1 hours from the beginning of 2022 until the end of last month.
Blenheim was more than 100 sunshine hours behind New Plymouth, with 2242.6 recorded so far this year, and sat in fourth place behind Whakatane’s 2297.4 hours and Richmond’s 2291.
Data from the Blenheim meteorological station at the Marlborough Research Centre in Grovetown showed that Spring 2022 in Blenheim was slightly sunnier than average, with 700.2 hours from September to November.
The total recorded rainfall from January to November this year, 781.8mm, means the town has experienced a considerably wetter-than-average year however, with the long-term average over that period being 590.6 mm.
Blenheim had already exceeded its average annual rainfall of 639 mm by August 19 with 41⁄2 months of the year still to go, meaning that 2022 will be one of the town’s wettest years on record.
A state of emergency was declared in Marlborough on
August 19 during a four-day rain event that caused property damage and road closures across the region, and a
Mayoral Relief Fund was established on August 22 to assist recovery efforts.
Only nine years between 1930 and 2021 have exceeded 781.8mm, but 2022 is still highly unlikely to break Blenheim’s wettest year on record: in 1995 it recorded 1003.4mm.
Temperature-wise, last month was the fourth-warmest November in Blenheim on record for the 91 years between 1932 and 2022.
It was also the tenth year in a row that the November mean temperature had been above average.