Ex-tropical Cyclone "Cook" hit North Island, New Zealand around 07:00 UTC (19:00 NZST) on Thursday, April 13, 2017, bringing strong winds and dumping heavy rain on already saturated soil. The cyclone downed trees and power lines, caused severe traffic…
After hitting New Caledonia with strong winds and heavy rain, Tropical Cyclone "Cook" has undergone extratropical transition but what's left of it is still very potent and is now moving toward New Zealand landfall. Over the past several weeks the…
Remnants of Tropical Cyclone "Debbie" have reached New Zealand and are now dumping flooding rain across the North Island. Parts of the region have declared states of emergency and are expecting record flooding Wednesday. The storm will continue affecting…
Scientists on board NIWA’s research vessel Ikatere took to the water in January with state-of-the-art equipment to map the sea floor between Cape Campbell and Spyglass Point to the south of Kaikoura and added more fault ruptures to the fault map of…
Extremely heavy rains that struck North Island, New Zealand over the past week have caused a huge landslide in Waikato District. According to media reports, the entire hillside in Waikato moved on Sunday, March 12, 2017, after the region saw between 180 and 220 mm…
A very large sinkhole has opened up in Auckland's New Lynn after a week of extremely heavy rainfall dumped by a powerful storm centered over the Tasman Sea. The structure of this storm was similar to a tropical cyclone, NIWA said and shared some of the most…
A severe storm dubbed by NIWA meteorologists as Tasman Tempest has dumped extremely heavy rain and wreaked havoc in parts of northern New Zealand over the past couple of days. Some regions already saw 100-year storms and their worst flooding in a generation. A huge…
Parts of Northern New Zealand are being hit by extremely heavy rain as low over the Tasman Sea extends slow-moving fronts over the region. Rain is expected to continue through Sunday, March 12, 2017, but it will not be a steady rain, all week long. Some regions saw…
GeoNet's seismometer network between Taupo and the Tongariro National Park has been recording a swarm of small earthquakes since February 13, 2017. The swarm, a very common characteristic of the greater Rotorua-Taupo area, known as the Taupo Volcanic Zone,…
A new research carried out by scientists from the Victoria University of Wellington and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) shows that regional climate variability caused an “unusual” period in which some of New…
