So close, yet so far - Hawke's Bay avoids meteorological heatwave

A berry nice Sunday being enjoyed the way it should be by Beatrize, 4, and Angelo Juanola 8, tucking into some icecream. Photo / NZME

Hawke's Bay has narrowly avoided a meteorological heatwave.

MetService announced on Twitter that temperatures at Hawke's Bay airport today would need to reach 26.4C for the area's hot spell to officially be considered a "heatwave".

"A heatwave is when a place has five consecutive days where temperatures are at least 5C warmer than its average maximum for that month," Metservice said.

The weather station recorded a peak of 24.7C, less than 2C shy of the threshold.

MetService meteorologist Mmathapelo Makgabutlane said fairly strong gusty northwesterly winds at the airport could have worked to thwart the heat before the goal was reached.

"At the airport, the maximum gusts so far have been around 70km/h per hour," she said.

She said certain places in Hawke's Bay outside of the areas MetService measures may still experience a meteorological heatwave.

"So far we've been looking at Napier airport because we've got a good climate record there. However, that's not to say that other parts might not experience it and of course that doesn't take away from the experience of the past few days, because it has been swelteringly hot."

Despite the weather falling short of a heatwave so far, icecream sales have spiked, according to Rush Munro owner Vaughan Currie.

"When the weather and temperatures start to lift, we see a noticeable difference in icecream consumption, it's almost immediate," Currie said.

He said sales doubled from one weekend to the next.

"We did 800 icecream cones Saturday and Sunday when the temperatures were up around 30C in Hastings, but the prior weekend when those average temperatures were low 20s we would have been half that volume."