Gales next on the agenda in this wettest year

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Gisborne has broken yet another weather record, this time for the wettest year.

Continuous rainfall records started at Gisborne harbour in 1878, and then MetService started its official record-keeping at Darton Field airport in 1937.

From these two sources, the wettest year was 143 years ago, when 1634 millimetres was recorded in 1879.

Now there are a number of weather records to refer to, including those collected by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, in Bloomfield Road.

However, using MetService data curated locally, it would seem sometime in the past few wet days the 1879 record was broken.

A count yesterday showed Gisborne’s rainfall over the month to date had totalled 123.5mm, and that took the running total for the year to 1663.7mm.

With a full three months of the year still to come, it appears obvious that 2023 is going to be the wettest year on record by more than somewhat!

Of more immediate concern is the worry of any more severe weather, and in that regard MetService says nothing of the sort is on the radar.

However, it could be windy over the next few days. MetService says for Saturday, there is moderate confidence of severe west to southwest gales for much of the North Island. There is also moderate confidence of severe southwest gales for Māhia Peninsula and near the Tairāwhiti/Gisborne coast.