Atmospheric analysis

A weekly update describing soil moisture across the country to help assess whether severely to extremely dry conditions are occurring or imminent.

I have just completed the first week of my Blake NIWA Ambassadorship down in Lauder.

It was only about a year and a half ago that NIWA staff came back from a research voyage to the Kermadec Trench led by their colleagues from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

One of New Zealand’s leading climate scientist, Dr David Wratt, answers a series of questions about climate change in this new video series by NIWA.

Soil moisture levels across the North Island have remained largely unchanged when compared to this time last week.

Scientists are beginning a voyage to the middle of the marine food web today to find out more about one of the most complex networks on the planet.

The mud shrimp species Upogebia hirtifrons (White, 1847) is a member of the large and widespread Upogebiidae family.

A hotspot persists and has expanded in the Wairarapa region. In the South Island, hotspots exist in eastern Marlborough and from central Canterbury through to northeast Otago.

Three plants of an endemic submerged quillwort (Isoëtes) were recovered from Lake Ōmāpere by NIWA in 1998, prior to the lake weed (Egeria densa) dying off and the lake switching into an algal dominated turbid state. No further isoëtes plants have been observed in the lake since that time.

Understanding our future climate so New Zealanders can adapt and thrive is the aim of the Deep South National Science Challenge, which today announced its first allocation of funds to improve predictions of climate change.