KEY POINTS:
Looking back, some argue it was always going to be idiotic to split the weather research scientists from the weather forecasters. But give the politicians and bureaucrats some leeway - with the weather, its hard to predict what's going to happen.
Split they did though, in 1992, and
despite a couple of reviews since recommending the two organisations re-merge, they haven't.
The developing cold front between Niwa and the MetService culminated last week when the Government appointed a mediator to sort out their behind-closed-doors dispute.
The appointment follows concerns that a lack of co-operation is damaging the country's overall weather forecasting capacity, and a review last year which called for the two companies to merge. The review recommended the introduction of new national weather objectives, including improved forecasting of severe events such as floods and snow storms.
A fog has descended over developments since, but in the eye of the storm is New Zealand's first weather supercomputer, bought in 1999 to further Niwa's scientific work and boosted in 2004 to four times its original capacity. It was christened Kupe to recognise the spirit of scientific discovery in which it was purchased.
Niwa scientists developed a new weather forecasting model on the computer, one which some say enables faster, more reliable warning of extreme weather.
Trouble is, that's MetService's job under an iron-clad contract with the Ministry of Transport - and at the moment they can't access the Niwa information. Understanding just why that's the case is like predicting when lightning will strike but it seems to relate to the competitive model.
Some argue it's information that would give farmers more time to shift stock ahead of snow or floods; councils more time to launch contingency plans; and influence decisions by boaties, pilots and trampers.
Niwa's former head Paul Hargreaves claimed this week the dispute had resulted in new early flood-warning technology going unused. The MetService says it is the role of regional councils to predict floods and the technology may not be that hot anyway.
Or it could all be a storm in a teacup. "Storm? What storm?" was the official line during the week.
The current confused picture is said to have been brewing since the 1990s when the old Department of Science and Industrial Research (DSIR), was broken into Crown Research Institutes.(CRIs).
Out of the old Meteorological Service was born Niwa, or the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. Here the scientists who predict climate change and extreme weather events congregate.
Separated from them was a new State Owned Enterprise, today's MetService, and this is where the meteorologists - the weather forecasters - live.
Both are independent and where the SOE is set up to make a profit, the CRI has to return a dividend. Herein lies the problem. Some say the profit-driven nature of the businesses has been detrimental to communication and sharing.
Weather forecaster Augie Auer predicts Niwa - who he criticises for "stretching its boundaries" - is planning to grab the lucrative Government contract for severe weather and marine forecasting and the MetService will naturally resist.
"That's the pie and maybe they'll divide the pie in half. If they do, Niwa will come out the winner because at the moment they've got nothing and the MetService has got it all."
Auer agrees it's all driven by the need to make profits and Niwa would be seeking to recover some of the costs of developing its detailed computer models. He wonders if the MetService might also be under pressure from Treasury to account for its performance, suspecting slipping standards and hints at some "interesting personalities" at the two organisations.
It was suggested to the Weekend Herald that the stand-off has been blown out of proportion. But Auer asks why, if the two organisations were not at each other's throats, a mediator had to be called in.
He recalls about 10 years ago, as the MetServices's chief meteorologist, attending a meeting between Niwa and the MetService at a seafood restaurant on Greta Pt, in Wellington, next to the Niwa headquarters. The aim was to define their respective jurisdictions.
"There were five representatives from each. I could see right there each side was trying to protect its turf."
Auer says it was a "pleasant and cordial" evening but he always remembered that meeting.
"Now when I hear stories like this I think 'yep', no one went home and forgot about it all ... there's still something festering."
Whether it makes any difference to the weather is a moot point. The MetService undoubtedly has its critics, from farmers and boaties to office workers caught out by the rain. But like Wellington's wind, one man's zephyr is another's inverted umbrella.
"Not very impressed" is mid-Canterbury farmer Paul Bruce's opinion on the MetService. Bruce, whose family were stranded after a snowstorm for 15 days without power at Highbank, 10km north of Methven, has more or less given up on weather forecasts.
He reckons they were more accurate when he was a kid when "people were manning lighthouses" and had a better idea of what was going on.
But Federated Farmers president Charlie Pederson says these days long-term forecasts - critical to farmers - are generally accurate. And while farmers get grumpy if short-term forecasts are wrong, they concede New Zealand is a difficult country to predict weather.
"The country's a little thin country and lies across the weather patterns, and they go across pretty quickly."
Jed Shirley, general manager regional services for the Horizons Regional Council, is pretty happy with the MetService which supplies rainfall data used to assess river levels.
Shirley says the council's Manawatu-Wanganui territory, running from Taumaranui down to Levin, has a population base of just 250,000 so does not enjoy a huge rate base.
Since the disastrous flooding in February 2004 which affected 70 per cent of the region resulting in an estimated $300 million damage, the council has committed $2 million towards developing its own projects.
Shirley says it is better able to predict the height of rivers from forecast rainfall events rather than having to rely on real-time information from river gauges. "It works well."
Horizons would also use relevant information if Niwa could supply it.
Internationally, such a division is an unusual set-up; in the big weather centres of Europe, America and Australia all the services are combined.
Hargreaves, an original Niwa board member who became its chief executive before retiring a few years ago, was last year made an Officer of the Order of Merit in the New Year Honours. He says the two organisations have pursued different priorities since the split.
Where Niwa spent big on technology, the MetService pursued better methods of communicating the weather, and they've done well.
The forecast service has developed products and has television graphics software being used on television in Ireland and Australia.
Says Hargreaves: "They have an international arm and the Government couldn't possibly complain because they've behaved as an SOE should and all credit to them. However, it wasn't necessarily the best way to improve weather forecasting services for New Zealand."
Niwa, meanwhile, acquired the supercomputer to undertake large scale environmental modelling and gained access to the British climate weather model, which, according to Hargreaves, is probably the best in the world.
Hargreaves was partly behind a review of the services in 2001 by a retired deputy director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The conclusion, he says, was that the separation had been damaging.
"And in fact it was also noted that no other country in the world had done this, separated out its weather and climate services in this way and that they should be brought together."
The recommendation was "strenuously resisted" by MetService, he says. He thinks the contract to provide weather forecasting, which nobody else can bid for, is worth around $14 million a year.
But the new big supercomputers have simply overtaken the old in the forecasting arena.
"It's now possible to provide weather forecasting 12 to 36 hours earlier. You combine that with flood forecasting, hazard forecasting and you can get a situation where you can identify that flooding will occur in such and such a specific area, you can come right down and be very specific about it.
"It's a case where technology has overtaken and you are left with a situation that was set up historically, 15 years or so ago, when this contract was set up to protect MetService when it was originally established. Nobody else could provide weather forecasting in New Zealand and that's what we're living with today."
There are some, though, who question if there is any point to re-merging and one expert source, from neither organisation, thinks the belief a supercomputer would make forecasts better is flawed logic.
A big computer is all very well, he said, but you still need the experts to interpret the data.
"Where are all the meteorologists? All the meteorologists are at MetService. Who are the guys that are interpreting computer output? They're all at the MetService. That's what they're trained to do."
The MetService provides a pretty good job, he thinks.
"Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong. Often when they get it wrong it's a particular meteorological situation which in some instances is unforecastable."
The principle of getting both organisations to work together was sound, "but it's an over-simplification to think that if you get these guys working together, all of a sudden we're going to get better weather forecasts. It doesn't happen like that in weather forecasting."
"At the moment there's very little dialogue because you don't want to give too much away. Well, they're competing but they ought not to be."
Even Paul Hutchison, the National Party MP who this week called for the Government to get the situation resolved, agrees our forecasts aren't too bad.
He has had pilots write to him saying the service was haphazard but when he looked into it he found it was pretty good. "It's certainly been on a standard comparable to most other developed countries."
The long-range forecast from those in the know about Niwa and the MetService? This could go on for years.
