Sun shine - what sun

[philipgm]

I wonder when the sun will return,  been cloudy for too long and still wet all this coming week. :-(

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[JennyLeez]

Although we saw a glimpse of it yesterday, so far April over on the east coast is typical of years gone by. A wet start and a dry finish. Cept for April 1011 when it did the opposite.

Some data so far from out community for April.
Ohuka 194.1mm in 11 days out of 12
Nuhaka 115.3mm in 8 days
Mohaka 86.7 in 7 days
Wairoa 100.9 in 9 days
Frasertown 104.1 in 9 days
Mahia Beach 76.5 in 9 days
Whangawehi 78.7 in 8 days
Gisborne 46.2 on 10 days

Our East Coast community is here: http://nzpws.net

[David]

Auckland northwards is doing very well for sunshine this month - check out the contrast shown in this NIWA map

[Rwood]

There's a good chance of Ch'ch breaking its record April low tally of 80 hours unless there's a vast improvement soon. In W'gton we won't set a record thanks to 5 sunny days at the start of the month, but the dreadful run since may break records for 14-day tallies or something similar.

[TonyC]

We've had a total of five and a half hours of sunshine at Port Robinson over the 13 days of this month so far.................

[JennyLeez]

12.1 Sunshine hours for April over on the East chalking up 0.2 yesterday

Mind this is fairly normal for us. A wet start to April and a dry ending.

[Rwood]

Whatever happens, won't match Waimate's infamous tally of just 60 hours for the whole of December 1959 - barely 13% of the possible ... NZ record low for April is 54 hours at Invercargill in 1949.

[ato2]

Just glancing at that map- it doesn't seem to match with my experience of this month in New Plymouth: it has been quite sunny and dry.

[Rwood]

New Plymouth is presently not having its data used for the maps as the recorder is to be investigated. NIWA finally woke up to the fact that it has been seriously over-reading and presumably will replace or recalibrate. Mind you, it's only one in a considerable list of sites with this issue - Gisborne has it to a lesser extent, Whakatane is outrageously high and many SI sites are also too "optimistic". Locally, Paraparaumu EWS is topping the manual value at the same site by more than 250 hours per year, as an indicator ...

[David]

Interesting, the typical April pattern for Auckland is fine dry start, wet ending