This month is likely to go down as one of Auckland’s dreariest Januarys on the books - as well as its wettest - with the city averaging a paltry five hours of sunshine each day.
That’s just only about two thirds of the sunshine hours our biggest city would normally get in January, rating behind even much-maligned Wellington.
“By all accounts, it’s been a pretty dismal month in Auckland,” said Niwa Weather meteorologist Ben Noll, who crunched the provisional totals as another major rain-maker bore down on the city.
“So, if Aucklanders feel like it’s been a really dreary month, the stats really back that up.”
Data from Māngere’s climate station shows just 144 hours of bright sunshine for January, compared with a normal 240 hours.
There’d been five days when the sun didn’t appear at all over Tāmaki Makaurau - and another 18 days where Aucklanders saw fewer than five hours of it.
“From a holidaymaker’s perspective, the weather around the upper North Island this month has been horrendous, compared with what we’d get normally... it’s hard to get much worse.”
By comparison, Wellington has received an average eight hours of sunshine each day over January.
Noll said the month had proven a “harsh turn” for Auckland, which began summer with a December that brought nearly 224 sunshine hours – more than it’d typically receive over that month.
Awakening to another cloudy day in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland 😶🌫️
— NIWA Weather (@NiwaWeather) January 30, 2023
The city has averaged *less than 5 hours* of bright sunshine per day in January 🤦♂️
Month-to-date sunshine hours are around 65% of normal.
📹 Watch our weather cams live @ https://t.co/nSOob4Dwmk pic.twitter.com/9zN0VAYSi6
“We’re not starting 2023 on a bright and cheery note,” he said, adding that the region hadn’t seen the last of warm and wet conditions that La Niña has helped deliver.
It’s also been Auckland’s wettest month ever, with rainfall levels sitting at a whopping 769 per cent of normal as at Monday – or nearly 40 per cent of its annual average – on the back of Friday’s record-breaking deluge.
As well, it’s been hellishly muggy in the city, with humidity values typically sitting higher than 80 per cent.
An obvious culprit for the gloomy conditions was La Niña - an ocean-driven climate system that’s traditionally brought cloud and rain, but also plenty of warmth, to the northeastern regions.
“We’ve basically had the Southwest Pacific Convergence Zone [a persistent band of cloudiness and storms] leaning on the northern regions of the country, which is something that very rarely happens,” Noll said.
“So, it’s been La Niña going full-bore.”
For Aucklanders, the good news was that, after three years in the driver’s seat of New Zealand’s climate, La Niña was finally set to fade out over coming months – likely making way for its counterpart, El Niño, later in 2023.
The bad news was its influence wouldn’t disappear quickly: Niwa’s January-to-March outlook picked plenty of potential for sub-tropical low-pressure systems to visit the upper North Island over the period.
Its outlook for February to April was due out this week.