If New Zealand has anything in excess, it’s weather. And taxpayer-funded weather forecasting agencies. Our mid-ocean, mid-latitudes location, narrow island geography and mountains-to-plains topography bring often predictable fronts of rain, droughts, blasts of polar air, heat and everything in between, from the sub-tropical north to the sometimes snow-covered south. It can blow like crazy and we’re buffeted by swells and storms.
There’s a surfeit of “weather”, and with climate change bringing devastation such as that caused by Cyclone Gabrielle and more frequent floods, it’s getting more extreme.
And somehow, we’ve ended up with competing government agencies informing us about it. Weather watchers say this creates a climate of confusion at a time when clarity is vital.
In mid-2013, during the Key government’s second term, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) launched Niwa Weather, disrupting a 20-year status quo. For the first time in New Zealand, one taxpayer-funded agency was setting out on a collision course with another – MetService – in the highly sensitive field of weather forecasting.
The new kid on the block was audaciously taking on the wisdom and strength of the organisation authorised to provide New Zealanders with forecasts and warnings since the Bolger government’s 1992 science reforms disestablished the DSIR and NZ Meteorological Service and created Niwa as a Crown Research Institute and MetService as a State-Owned Enterprise.
MetService is the country’s designated national agency with the World Meteorological Organisation, which expects member countries to have a “single authoritative voice” for severe weather forecasting. Under contracts with the crown, MetService is the only authorised provider of severe weather warnings and other public safety services, operating the Wellington tropical cyclone warning centre and providing search and rescue support, as well as providing weather information to the aviation industry.
Niwa inherited “big picture” climate and weather research and archival tasks in the 1992 reforms. But its launch of Niwa Weather rather clouded the forecasting picture: among other moves, it picked up a contract in 2020 with the Department of Conservation to provide forecasts for national parks and other conservation areas.
And its scientists, such as Chris Brandolino, became household names, with regular TV, radio and newspaper appearances commenting on the weather. This not only muddied the waters, but MetService argued the potential confusion could compromise public safety.
After years of tolerance of Niwa’s incursions, MetService management pulled the emergency cord on interference in December 2022. The final straw was pressure being exerted for the SOE to move into Niwa’s Greta Point campus as part of the now defunct Wellington Science City plan.
Indignant at that influence from the Science City panel, MetService chief executive Stephen Hunt wrote to then state-owned enterprises minister David Clark warning of the possible consequences of such a move: “The crown duplicates through Niwa some of the capabilities already available via MetService as the crown-contracted provider … The boundaries of activities have blurred over time, and we believe New Zealand’s safety and prosperity may be compromised in a future environment of increasingly severe weather.”
The agency had previously warned that sharing the limelight with Niwa could split media attention during extreme weather events, risking a public safety hazard.
Hunt asked to meet Clark, and Treasury documents show that within a week, Clark kicked off what became the Project Hau Nuku review of forecasting services, something many in the sector had wanted for almost a decade.
The outcome of that review, announced last September by then science, innovation and technology minister Judith Collins, is that the two agencies will merge, with MetService absorbed into the bigger Niwa.
Trust in the models
Mind-boggling quantities of data taken through the atmosphere, as well as satellite and radar imagery and suites of highly accurate computer models, are absorbed each day by forecasters to let you know if you should take a brolly to work. Even 10 days to two weeks out, these models give a generally good indication of where the weather systems and fronts will be, even if their precise location and the timing may be a bit off. Forecasters get to know the personality of each of these models and when to believe or question them.
MetService meteorologists are especially under pressure when they get strong guidance of severe storms heading our way. In mid-2019, the agency introduced a two-tier warning system: an orange warning for severe weather with the potential to affect people, animals and property, and a new red warning category reserved for life-threatening events, when immediate action needs to be taken to protect life.
The first red warning was issued in February 2020 for heavy rain in Westland and Fiordland, where roads were washed out, trapping about 1000 people in Milford Sound and causing significant flooding in Southland. In May 2021, the second red warning was issued in Mid and South Canterbury as rain poured, rivers rose, communities were evacuated and a state of emergency declared. The MetService team’s crisis weather communication plan was activated so safety messages could be given early and clearly to the public.
These red weather events are increasing in frequency with climate change, but MetService believes the competition with Niwa is jeopardising clear messaging at such times.
The boundaries have blurred over time … safety and prosperity may be compromised.
As torrential rain and flooding battered the West Coast in April last year, the agency was at odds with Niwa over incorrect advice Niwa gave to a civil defence emergency management team (see “Raining confusion”, below). In a briefing to the Project Hau Nuku forecasting review, released to the Otago Daily Times under the Official Information Act, MetService outlined how it had to deal with “competing narratives” from Niwa during the three-day event.
Of “particular concern” was incorrect advice from Niwa to the Ministry of Transport’s multi-agency transport response team for civil emergencies. MetService said Niwa’s rainfall predictions for Westland were significantly higher than its own, but it forecast “very dry” conditions for the area west of Motueka, despite a MetService severe weather watch that was later upgraded to a warning for heavy rain.
Niwa also provided over-inflated rainfall forecasts for Otago and Southland during the same weather event, MetService told the review.
Niwa was “active on social media and through their interactive channels, providing detailed forecast information, including specific forecasts of rainfall amounts”.
“To our knowledge, Niwa did not mention or promote warnings issued by MetService. This illustrates a common occurrence, with Niwa contributing substantially to the public narrative during major weather events without connecting with or supporting the official warning service. This appears to reflect Niwa’s competitive stance.”
It added that the duplication “highlights the potential for confusion among government agencies responding to a crisis event. The competing narrative from Niwa, which had the potential to undermine the warning system, was unhelpful and a good example of unproductive competition.”
MetService itself doesn’t always get things right, of course. After the Auckland Anniversary floods in 2023 – and despite issuing two red warnings – it conceded its forecasting models badly under-estimated what was to come and a review made several recommendations for improvement.
Overblowing it
It’s difficult to quantify how much Niwa Weather has cost Kiwi taxpayers in the past 12 years, but a highly conservative calculation would be at least $10 million.
However, that extra cost, and the overlap and unnecessary competition with MetService, may not be the worst thing that has come out of it. That instead could be the way it has created confusion, particularly when severe weather is looming, says Philip Duncan, founder and chief executive of private forecaster Weather Watch.
“Niwa has helped make the public feel confused about weather,” Duncan says. “As far as I can tell, Niwa Weather was on a mission to get in the news as much as possible, with super hyped-up tweets to always ‘out do’ MetService. If MetService said winds of 100km/h, Niwa would say 120km/h. If MetService said 30°C was the high tomorrow, Niwa would say a 35°C heatwave. So Niwa took the headlines off MetService with inaccurate hype.”
Shortlived takeover?
Given the animosity that has grown between the state forecasting agencies, how will they fare under the same umbrella?
The move has been sold as a merger. But Niwa as the bigger organisation is clearly in the driving seat and its board has been charged with working out how much to pay for MetService. Some consider it more a takeover.
State-Owned Enterprises Minister Simeon Brown’s office says a date for the select committee hearing on the changes has yet to be “publicised”, but it expected operational details of the merger were being worked through by both boards.
The irony now is that Niwa’s own days appear numbered. As part of the science-sector reforms announced by the government in January, Niwa and GNS Science will lose their Crown Research Institute (CRI) status and be combined to form a new earth sciences-focused Public Research Organisation, Niwa bringing its new, wholly-owned subsidiary MetService into the melting pot.
But why?
What was it that compelled Niwa to go head-to-head with its colleague MetService so that taxpayers ended up funding two state weather forecasters? Niwa is not saying. Questions from the Listener and other media organisations over the years have never been addressed. An attempt by this writer in August 2022 to elicit answers about Niwa Weather resulted in the same answer – “confidential and commercially sensitive” – seven times.
This time around, the Listener emailed Niwa chief executive John Morgan twice and its communications team another two times to see if they would discuss the genesis of Niwa Weather. None of the four emails received a response.
What is clear is Niwa neither sought, nor got, explicit approval from the National government of the day to establish its forecasting operation. Instead, the move received tacit approval at the time from science minister Steven Joyce. Later, in 2019, when pressed about the senselessness of having two competing taxpayer-funded forecasting organisations, Labour’s science minister Megan Woods confirmed no request was ever made to cabinet regarding Niwa Weather’s establishment and she had been advised it had not required ministerial approval.
In a previously unpublished interview from March 2021, Morgan was asked if he could foresee a time when Niwa and MetService might join up again. “We don’t waste a lot of time on whether we should or shouldn’t be back together again. That’s a shareholder decision, not for us.”
Niwa had “never got out of” forecasting, he said then, even after the 1992 split. In 2003, it proudly announced a contract with the UK Met Office to provide environmental modelling and consultancy work.
“I’ve seen the papers when we were first established. It was expected we would continue to do weather. I suppose what’s happened over time is that the generic forecasting … it’s got better, and that’s the primary role of MetService, and they do that extraordinarily well, as good as any national forecaster would.
“Probably where we’re focused is when you want that really high-resolution, spatial and temporal scale forecasting, and more on the impacts … when that weather hits.”
At that time, Morgan said Niwa Weather employed half a dozen forecasters. Asked if he wanted it to become the country’s national forecasting agency rather than MetService, he said, “That’s not our aspiration. We just want New Zealand to have access to the very best forecasting capability in the areas that we are servicing.”
Joyce told the Listener the launch of Niwa Weather had been viewed as an operational move. “But it wasn’t quite how it seems, is the way I would describe it. Back then, Niwa had the supercomputer and was replacing it, and they had their climate models on the supercomputer. They were looking at how they might expand their climate wares, if you like. They started looking at the potential for truly granular forecasts, ie, for farmers, to do microforecasts for individual farmers and individual parts of their farms, which MetService couldn’t do with its mandate for commercial forecasting.
“So Niwa was doing this as a sort of research project. Of course, CRIs are also charged with coming up with ways of earning income, and they thought this was an avenue they could potentially explore, which MetService really wasn’t interested in.”
Joyce says his memory is hazy, but he remembers concerns being raised at the time. “It probably came from MetService, being a bit concerned about its mandate. I did raise that with Niwa – that we don’t want two forecasting services; that would be silly. And they maintained that that wasn’t going to happen because what they were doing was entirely different.”
Joyce asked MBIE or Treasury – he’s unsure which – if they had any concerns, the response was that they didn’t.
“I’d asked them to review the situation at that stage and make sure it was complementary not competitive, and they said that was the case. What I think has happened subsequently – perhaps because of the way technology has evolved, perhaps because they saw a chance and took it, perhaps because the other ministers may not have been keeping a close eye on what they were doing – that obviously the differentiation appears to have shrunk.”
Data-sharing reversal
The first WeatherWatch’s Philip Duncan heard about Niwa Weather was when clients The New Zealand Herald and Auckland Civil Defence rang one morning in mid-2013. He says both told him Niwa had approached them in an effort to drum up business for their new venture.
“What made this so offensive at the time was Niwa had created an agreement with WeatherWatch to share public data back with the public to help Civil Defence and others during storms. But they took that off the table and decided to compete with MetService and WeatherWatch instead.
“This was the moment I lost respect for them as a CRI, and to this day I feel bitter about it. No private sector business has done that to my small company, let alone a crown agency which I help fund with my taxes.” Duncan approached a succession of senior government ministers about Niwa Weather and made several formal complaints to the Commerce Commission. “I never ever met an MP who disagreed with me, yet nothing changed. The government cannibalised itself because no elected official understood what was happening.”
Scratching an itch?
At the end of the 1990s, when Jenny Shipley’s National government was in its last throes, MetService was earmarked for sale. Sources say a secure room at its Kelburn, Wellington, headquarters was set aside so potential buyers could discreetly view commercial documents. When the Labour government of Helen Clark came to power in November 1999, the sale of MetService was scrapped.
A former MetService manager, who asked not to be named, told the Listener Niwa may have had designs on MetService then, close to 15 years before it set up its own weather arm. “The very fact there had been thought of selling us off put the idea in Niwa’s head that maybe they should buy us. I suspect it might have been one of the organisations that could have been doing due diligence. That was taken off the table, but then what pissed us off was they were running their models and they wouldn’t let us use them. We got quite upset by that, because here they were being publicly funded to do research, and publicly funded to run their supercomputer, but they wouldn’t give us the output.”
When Niwa Weather started in June 2013, it was touted as a “free generic weather website”. Comments at the time on the online NZ Weather Forum about the new service were mixed. “Seems to me that Niwa is starting to compete with MetService now,” commentator Tornado Tim said. “If Niwa is smart they should apply for the Ministry of Transport contract later.”
NZstorm: “Does it make sense for Niwa to be doing weather forecasting when the MetService already cover the base? I’m thinking from the aspect of the state funding.”
“Andrew from Niwa here (although these are my personal comments): There are no human forecasters adjusting the outputs as at MetService. However, the forecasts are matched to observations at the stations and are very good (according to the scientists who measure the results).”
Three months later, the Niwa website talked about two new online forecasting offerings – Niwa Forecast, a subscription service for farmers and growers, and Niwa Weather, providing “urban New Zealanders with an instant visual snapshot of the temperature, rainfall, wind speed and direction, and general weather conditions expected in their town or city over the next six days”.
Both were backed by Niwa’s supercomputer, Fitzroy, with its computational power and “state-of-the-art high-resolution forecasting capability”.
Niwa Weather’s contract with the Department of Conservation was extended last year for a further three years. “Niwa’s modelling resolved complex terrain more accurately and leads to better forecasts for rain and wind, which are often of most interest to those heading out on public conservation land,” says DoC’s national visitor centre adviser, Colin McFetridge. Staff, including rangers, have said they find it valuable for planning and carrying out work, he says.
Niwa also retains links with the UK Met Office. But its zenith is probably the forecasting it did for the America’s Cup in Auckland in 2021. Fitzroy was used to analyse past conditions and model ocean currents in the Hauraki Gulf to extremely high resolution, as well as for forecasting, for Team New Zealand. However, efforts to learn from Niwa how successful these ventures have been draw “confidential and commercially sensitive” responses. It won’t say if there have been any benefits, financially or otherwise.
Commercial drive
Dunedin scientist and keen industry watcher Dr Murray Boardman has worked for MetService and been involved with Niwa. He was surprised when New Zealand suddenly had two government forecasters and exasperated that ministers overlooked for a long time how “ludicrous” it was for taxpayers to be funding two operations.
“A big concern for me is not necessarily that Niwa started a weather unit. Rather, it was the way they went about it, cloak and dagger style, ably supported by the staggering lack of ministerial awareness on what was happening and ignoring the implications.”
Peter Lennox was MetService’s chief executive when Niwa made its move. “They were pretty blatant about it,” he says, “in the sense they felt it was an extra service they could provide and they could get money from it. Niwa like to think of themselves as a state-owned enterprise from a commercial point of view, but of course, they’re not. They’re a very ambitious company and they’ve been successful in many areas. They just saw it as another part of their business … even though there is another government company that is already doing that.”
Lennox was asked at a select committee hearing why the creep of Niwa into forecasting was happening. “I said, ‘Because the government has allowed it to happen.’
“There were protocols around what they could and couldn’t do, but they just pushed it to the limit. So, from our point of view, they got away with it, but it was inexorable, it was happening. And we always felt the work we were doing was far superior because we were meteorological experts.”
Lennox says MetService raised a red flag with Tony Ryall, its minister at the time. “We let them know about it, but there is a balance here, because John [Morgan] and I had a very cordial and respectful relationship. We knew that if either of us slagged either organisation off, it would be front page of the news, which would do neither of us any good. So, we just got on with it.
“They were really hands-off ministers; we had very few ministers visiting MetService in the 10 years I was there. They were not concerned at all – the word is ambivalent.”
In MetService’s mind must have been the fear that complaining too strongly might ultimately backfire. Instead, in such a lackadaisical political atmosphere, Niwa Weather continued to grow, build a social media presence, and encroach on to the territory of MetService.
Merger progress
MetService, Niwa and government officials are now working out details of the merger and how it can meet all the regulatory expectations. Acting chief executive Rob Harrison (Hunt has been on leave) says MetService is “taking a careful approach” to its planning, given the in-principle merger decision.
“There have been high-level meetings between MetService and Niwa, as you’d expect following the announcement,” says Harrison. “These have been conducted within the guidelines provided by MBIE and the Treasury to ensure compliance with competition law.”
Regular work with Niwa continues on externally funded research projects, World Meteorological Organisation matters and shared support work around the Pacific.
MetService is finalising answers to questions sent to all SOEs by the government, Harrison says. It is optimistic about future collaboration with Niwa and GNS Science. “Our combined capabilities create an opportunity to establish an integrated centre for natural hazards monitoring and warning services, which we all believe would be of benefit to New Zealand.”
Better weather?
So, has there been any benefit to New Zealand from having competing state weather forecasters?
“God no,” Duncan says. “They prohibit use of data that is free in other nations, they demand to know how we commercially want to use public data, then price it to a point where we can’t make it happen. Niwa won’t even work with New Zealand’s largest private forecaster, because they see us as competition. We get no maps, no data from Niwa, despite the efforts of volunteers over many decades to collect these readings.”
Boardman agrees: “This is not doubling forecasting, it’s diluting it, because what the public get is duplicative forecasts in the media, especially NZME and Stuff. The public would flick between the two agencies as if they had the same authority.”
He thinks the merging of MetService and Niwa may be a positive, “but only if Niwa baggage is not included. If Niwa treat the restructuring as a merger – read ‘takeover’ – rather than a new entity, things are unlikely to change much.
“The best outcome is that MetService retains its identity as a standalone unit of the new Public Research Organisation [PRO] and Niwa Weather is disbanded. That would be evidence that the Niwa hegemony had been consigned to history. But I wonder with the forced restructuring of Niwa into a PRO whether some of my concerns have been allayed – whether we have now reached a point to look beyond the past mysteries of Niwa Weather.
“With the establishment of the new PRO, I think it would be worthwhile for the government to halt the proposed merger of Niwa and MetService. I see little point in merging the two agencies and then restructuring into a PRO with GNS Science.
“That would give the opportunity for the MetService to be more forthright in what it deems to be the best structure.”
Raining confusion
In recent years there have been several examples of Niwa Weather wrongly predicting severe weather, forcing MetService to raise concerns or step in to correct forecasts.
In June 2021, a decision to declare a state of local emergency and evacuate residents in Breaker Bay, Wellington, was based on Niwa swell modelling incorrectly predicting wave heights in a southerly storm.
In June 2023, MetService issued a red warning for what became a local state of emergency and evacuation in Gisborne. Niwa posted on X with a map showing the only place with a “high chance” of 100mm or more of rain was in the Ruahine Range, southwest of Waiouru. Its map used the same colours as MetService’s red and orange warnings and yellow watches to delineate high chance, medium chance and low chance. There was major flooding in Gisborne.
In April last year, during a torrential rainstorm on the West Coast, MetService had to correct Niwa’s overinflated rainfall predictions made to a civil defence emergency management team and ensure it had the correct warnings to work with.
MetService chief executive Stephen Hunt wrote to Niwa chief executive John Morgan about the last two occasions, reiterating that conflicting warnings from government agencies could cause confusion and an “erosion in public safety”, he wrote (the letter was obtained by the Otago Daily Times under the Official Information Act).
“Again, I ask your Niwa Weather spokespeople to use the official severe weather watch and warning information that MetService provides during warning-level events, and to play their part in consistent public messaging,” Hunt said.
He added conflicting warnings “in particular from other government organisations, can lead to confusion when severe weather presents a risk to life and infrastructure”.
Paul Gorman once worked for MetService.