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| Auckland Rain Radar at 5:20 PM |
Now we get a lot of rain in Auckland - with an average of 1119mm across 132 days a year. Hardly surprising since we are in a temperate part of the world and no part of the country is further than 120km of the sea. Tropical winds pick up the water and dump it on the nearest land mass - us. Which is why tourists often remark his green the countryside is.
January is usually our warmest and driest month. The countryside and city lawns turn brown, there are cries of drought, constant warnings of the fire risk and how we must all conserve water. But not this year. It was wet before Christmas (that isn’t that unusual actually) then we had a nice warm spell. But since New Year we have had only a few sunny days.
But today someone wrung a sponge out over us. Torrential doesn’t really describe it adequately with 109.5mm falling between 6:00AM and 5:00pm (40mm falling between 3:00 and 4:00PM) and it is still falling heavily at 6:00PM. In the 25 years we have been in this house I have never seen so much loose water around the house.
I am certainly glad of five things today:
- I worked from home today and didn’t have drive anywhere - even though we get those 132 days of rain a year, for many Auckland drivers rain seems to be an unusual phenomenon that cause them to be either drive with excessive caution or like raving lunatics
- That we chose not to go away for the long holiday weekend
- I didn’t spend $400+ on tickets see Elton John tonight in an outdoor show (or tomorrow night for that matter since it is supposed to rain tomorrow too)
- That on those few fine days over Christmas that I re-concreted some of my drains in the backyard because water was literally swirling around one of them
- That my parcels from Nottingham arrived yesterday otherwise they might have floated away.
That is pretty torrential Mark! We had what was described as a Biblical downpour here in the South West a few years ago, where it dumped a huge volume of water in a very short space of time (approx 15 minutes) and caused lots of flash floods of properties.
ReplyDeleteMind you I've never seen anything to compare to the rainy season downpours when I lived in Nigeria, where the roads would simply disappear from view under the sheer volume of water in just a few minutes, even with the benefits of storm drains by the side of the road. I did get caught in one one evening walking home which was memorable, but didn't get cold because the rain was warm!
We are fortunate that we are a good 20 metres above and a kilometre distant from the local creek, but within a couple of kilometres of us there has been significant flash flooding. It has stopped now but there is a promise of more rain tomorrow. It’s going to be a good weekend for painting I think.
DeleteThis weather has been shown on the BBC News website and the video footage is pretty incredible. Having the airport flooded must cause some delays and been a right pain in the proverbial!
DeleteYes it got dramatically worse after I posted this. I work at the airport and I struggled to understand how it was that badly flooded…the airport is beside the sea so the drains must have backs up against the high tide. Basically the international terminal is closed for 48 hours. I haven’t heard if my building was flooded, but at least my office is not on the ground floor.
DeleteLol...just back from a game at Julian's Mark and heard NIWA has confirmed today was literally THE wettest day on record in Auckland. Drive home was pretty good, only one flood southbound at Mt Wellington with two of four lanes out if use...northbound there were several sections with police and/or traffic control vehicles. After getting off at Bombay, on the road over to Pukekohe (8km) there were two slips covering half the raid with police controlling one lane traffic etc...several sports field in Puke itself look like lakes!
ReplyDeleteJane got a video sent to her while we were at Julian's...Ridings Road had a torrent of brown water racing down it....looked like a river! That reminds me, was also a slip on Remuera Road just after coming out or Ridings.....but we had a good game of Nuts! 😀
Yes there was knee deep water at the low points near us and deeper a little further away. Thankfully we are well away from the lowest point around us.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you and house stayed dry.
ReplyDeleteMost of the water has drained away now, but there are two more big systems
Deletedue to hit us tomorrow and Monday.
The thing that always amazes me about floods is how some areas you think won't be affected are knee deep while others which appear to the eye to be low-lying are unaffected. My brother undertook his usual Friday escape to their place up north yesterday and said it was quite an ordeal getting there.
ReplyDeleteWe aren’t prone to major flooding because there are no major watercourses in Auckland and with most of the city on the isthmus doesn't allow a water build up.
DeleteTell me about it. The flooding from constant record setting rainfall here in California USA has closed roads and damaged my house. Plus my house is a mess bc we couldn’t take the children anywhere. Further proof that the outside is terrible. 😀
ReplyDeleteOur flooding isn’t as bad as yours for sure (although the people whose houses were inundated probably don’t agree). One of the deciding factors of buying our house was it is above the flood plain. In truth we occasionally get small localised flooding in low lying spots, but this level of flooding is very rare in Auckland.
DeleteSaw the flooding on the news Mark, glad you are OK.
ReplyDeleteYes we are all good and dry, but waiting for another day of forecast downpours tomorrow.
Deletesomething about holding the high ground
ReplyDeleteIndeed!
DeleteLooking like a classic British summer Mark 😂
ReplyDeleteAll the best. Aly
Hopefully we will get some good weather in February…if this &$#*@& rain ever stops!
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