Auckland floods: Mayor Wayne Brown says MetService should have owned up to poor modelling sooner

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.

Yesterday, findings from a MetService review revealed the models were poor and needed to be updated urgently alongside their severe weather warning system.

“I got a fair caning from the press including you guys for failing to predict something the weather forecasters couldn’t predict,” Brown told AM.

“It’s taken them a while to come good on it but I’m glad they have. It would have been nice if they owned up a bit earlier.

“The media might understand now that not everything is the mayor’s fault.”

Evacuations were part of Auckland-wide Anniversary Weekend flood response action amidst record rainfall.

On that night, January 27, Brown said there were no suggestions from the MetService team that they were surprised by the conditions.

However, he said he was very surprised by what happened.

“There was no warning at all,” he said.

“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.

“This is just madness,” one employee posted at 11.44pm, after reviewing unprecedented rainfall measurements across the city.

“The models WERE NOT going for these amounts,” another wrote.

“I still can’t believe it,” another said the next morning.

Caitlan Johnston is a breaking news reporter based in Waikato. She joined the Herald in 2022.