What is the national climate network (NCN)?
Situated around New Zealand and the Pacific are climate and weather monitoring stations numbering over 1200. They cover monitoring of everything from rainfall to sunshine to soil moisture, temperature, wind and more. Their core purpose is to provide a long-term climate record for New Zealand and the Pacific. The NCN data provided is one of NIWA’s core assets. Changes in demand means that the NCN has evolved into a more generic meteorological network that it is today.
Design of the network
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) gives directions for designing and managing observation networks. To ensure environmental change in New Zealand has been monitored as representatively as possible, these criteria are used for our network design: Urban areas; Climate regions; Primary industry regions; Altitude (Stations above 500m); Infill (typically commercially oriented).
What are the climate network tiers?
The proliferation of low-cost private stations and other all-in-one measuring systems, all with varying degrees of uncertainty of measurement, prompted the concept of a tiered system. Still being developed, the tiers depend on the station’s usage and data recorded. The tier system ranks from the most important to least important stations.
Tier 1: Reference stations
Highest Quality - meets full requirements of WMO standards
- High quality instrumentation, installation, and operations:
Electronic Weather Station - NIWA EWS | NIWA - Delivers key reference data for enduring long term time-series reporting on climate change and variability:
- Supports National Reporting (MfE, Stats New Zealand)
Tier 2: Regional stations
Medium Quality - meets “threshold” requirements of WMO standards
- High quality instrumentation, installation, and operations (some compromises):
Climate stations and instruments | NIWA - Contributes to global networks and models including the Unified Model used by NIWA
- Delivers ‘baseline’ data that provide spatial picture and support spatial products.
Tier 1 and 2 are core network stations. Main contributors are NIWA and MetService.
Tier 3: Third party stations
Reasonable Quality - meet the “threshold” level of the WMO standards, potentially with more compromises
- Delivers additional data to provide a ‘comprehensive’ spatial picture and support spatial products (see above).
- For specific projects – like a solar farm needing sunshine measurements.
Tier 4: Supplementary stations
Unclassified - Observing platforms of various and unknown quality.
- Includes data that may or may not meet established requirements.
- Project specific for third parties like Fire & Emergency New Zealand needing rainfall measurements.
View more information on NIWA's environmental information monitoring stations throughout New Zealand.
