Records set in city’s ‘bummer summer’

How do we measure just how miserable this summer has been for Aucklanders?

We can use a rain gauge: Nearly

600mm has fallen over our largest city already this season, with plenty of the wet stuff yet to come.

We can turn to sunshine hours — something even the notoriously gloomy capital scored better on than Auckland last month — or humidity percentage values that have often hovered hellishly in the

80s and 90s.

Or we can simply boil it down to two words: “Bummer summer,” as Ben Noll put it, borrowing a title the Niwa meteorologist earlier gave to Wellington’s dismal 2016-2017 run.

The season’s running rainfall total for Auckland now stands at

598mm — or 326 per cent of normal — easily locking in a record-wet summer, with weeks to go.

The bulk of that, of course, came with the city’s wettest month — 539mm dropped on Albert Park in January — and its wettest day, the one-in-200-year event that was January 27’s freak deluge.

Within the space of a month, beleaguered central city residents were doused with nearly half the rainfall they’d get in a year — eightand-a-half times what a typical January would bring.

It’s hardly been beach weather in Tauranga, either, where it has been the wettest summer since

1962-63, when Keith Holyoake was Prime Minister and just a few hundred thousand Kiwis had access to TV.

It has not been quite as dreary in

Wellington, but not sparkling, either: It has had its seventhwettest summer since 1972.

Look further south, however, and we see a glaring contrast: Large swathes of Otago and Southland are running “very” to “extremely” dry — or just one step from full-blown drought.

Colour-coded Niwa maps measuring current soil moisture anomalies show areas such as Buller, Southland, Otago and coastal Canterbury painted in yellows, ambers and browns — a dramatic difference from the dark blue covering most of a deeplysaturated North Island.

As Aucklanders received a paltry five hours of daily sunshine last month, spots such as Wanaka and Invercargill chalked up their driest Januarys in decades.

Noll has described this oddly split picture as a “tale of two islands”, with one obvious culprit to blame: La Nina.

The ocean-driven climate pattern, which has been meddling with our weather since the start of the decade, was notorious for bringing muggy, wet conditions to the northeast but a drier flavour to the south.

Then, in January, we saw rainmakers intensified by regional marine heatwaves.

Niwa’s February-April outlook picked the potential for more subtropical lows and flood-making “atmospheric rivers” around the upper North Island, with rainfall likely to stay above normal.

“So, La Nina won’t be bringing its car to a stop suddenly — more just gradually easing pressure on the accelerator.”