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Auckland mayor Wayne Brown said it would have been nice if MetService were quicker to admit that its weather forecasting models ahead of the devastating Auckland floods in January performed badly.
“They told us it was going to be 20mm of rain and it was 20 times what they [said].”
“With all the money and satellites and bits and pieces I think they could have done better.”
Brown said the weather event was a learning point for his teams as well, and that they even had some “blunders.
“Nobody had my phone number for instance.”
He said he got stuck in to make sure the performance of Auckland’s Emergency Management was fixed quickly.
“It was tested about five days later and it went a lot better,” he said.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown at the West Harbour Fire Station fronting the media in relation to the worst flooding the Auckland region has ever experienced.
The review examined MetService’s performance before and during the Auckland Anniversary storm and Cyclone Gabrielle two weeks later. Taken together, the two events caused up to $14.5 billion in damage and killed 15 people, making them among the worst natural disasters in New Zealand’s history.
“Performance of all available weather models in the lead-up to the Auckland Anniversary storm was poor,” the agency said in an internal review of the event, which has not been publicly released until now.
“Substantial changes” were also required to the agency’s severe weather warning system in the aftermath of the unprecedented deluge, according to a summary of the review obtained by the Herald under the Official Information Act.
The Herald has obtained Microsoft Teams chats between MetService staff which show how they reacted to the realisation on that Friday night that their models had been inaccurate.
