Atmospheric analysis

How long would it take to count all the grains of sand in the world? About 5000 seconds – a little over an hour and 20 minutes – if you had a Cray XC50. NIWA has just installed one at the High Performance Computing Facility in Wellington.

The aim of this voyage was to examine the movement and habitat utilization of pygmy blue whales in New Zealand waters.

Massive increases in computing power are allowing NIWA scientists to not only analyse more data, faster, but also to envisage completely new experiments.

As climate change takes hold, regional council planning, sustainability and hazard managers are looking to NIWA.

Ruth Beran discovers that public interest in the state of fresh waterways has driven a dramatic change in the tools used by scientists.

NIWA scientists like Leigh Tait were saddened by the human impact of the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, but he also says that it provided a “massive natural history experiment”.

RV Tangaroa carried out a six-week voyage to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean between 9 February and 21 March 2018.

NIWA and Vanuatu's Meteorology and Geohazards Department have installed a network of fully automatic weather stations across Vanuatu.

The first Wednesday of the month finds Philippa Eberlein and her Friends of the Maitai colleagues collecting samples from the Maitai River in Nelson.