Atmospheric analysis

A group of volunteers who love the Hutt River are helping to care for it over summer.

NIWA research ship Tangaroa has been chartered by the Ministry of Primary Industries to survey the Hoki fishery on the Chatham Rise during January and early February 2018.

As the road behind Hanmer Springs turns to gravel and a dust cloud forms in the rear vision mirror, the southern edge of Molesworth Station unfolds.

Every year NIWA carries out numerous marine surveillance missions, surveys at ports and harbours around the country. Their divers are looking for the pests that have hitched a ride to New Zealand waters and are capable of destroying our unique ecosystems and shellfish industry.

“You almost become a fishing psychologist – you can tell by the way people walk up the ramp to get their trailer if they’ve had a good day.”

A weekly update describing soil moisture across the country to help assess whether severely to extremely dry conditions are occurring or imminent. Regions experiencing these soil moisture deficits are deemed “hotspots”. Persistent hotspot regions have the potential to develop into drought.

Four seasons with a little bit of everything.
It started with the bummer summer… then came the fires, rain, flooding and a very weird November.
But it’s all in a year of weather as NIWA wraps up the seasonal highlights.

Citizen scientists take on Hutt River

Excessive nutrient input (eutrophication) threatens many New Zealand estuaries causing ecological problems, such as algal blooms and poor physical and chemical conditions for estuarine life.

The Tangaroa assisted in New Zealand’s largest ever deployment of seafloor earthquake recording instruments in a bid to learn more about the earthquake behaviour of the tectonic plates beneath the east coast of the North Island.

It’s been a year of discovery for NIWA scientists who now know more than they did 12 months ago – their top five discoveries for the year range from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere.