Torrential rain last night saw Napier drivers slowing to snails pace and flash flooding in some of the city's streets.
Although Hawke's Bay Airport recorded only 11mm of rain, Weather Watch's Philip Duncan said the Napier hill more than likely experienced more rain than that.
"There's only a few weather station that the government has got and the heavy rain clearly missed them last night," he said.
Yet despite the brief but intense rain-storm, which occured about 5.45pm, such localised downpours and flooding are nothing unusual.
"We've been seeing these weather patterns around both islands for the last month or so and it's not abnormal. December is still technically spring, so you can quite typically get a mixture of warm and cool weather which is what happened yesterday, and that produces these big downpours or what we like to call 'localised'."