A wild night

The wind turned to the south around 7pm last night, accompanied by some torrential rain. But that was just the entree.

The wind here really started to howl around 9pm, and it has blown a gale overnight. Metservice is currently showing a southerly at 81km/h for Wanganui, with gusts of up to 107km/h, although we suspect that the gales were much stronger than that in the early hours of the morning when the whare was shaking!

But we've only seen the edge of this winter storm. Large parts of the South Island are either under water or snow. From what we saw on Twitter last night, Wellington has felt the brunt of the wild weather, and we've heard reports of some pretty impressive thunderstorms in and around Auckland overnight.

A big ups to the weather forecasters from Metservice and Weatherwatch who saw this storm coming and issued abundant warnings. Likewise, our appreciation goes to those who are keeping essential services running, especially those who are battling the weather to restore power supplies; if the weather seems wild from the comfort of our whare, it must be atrocious for those who are out in it just doing their jobs.

Hopefully, today will be the last day of this particular storm as the weather system driving it moves away to the east. But there's no doubt at all that winter is here!