Chris Ford’s Blog

As I write this, heavy snow showers are falling in Dunedin.

So far, it is a picture postcard sight - trees looking sugar coated, the ground covered in glistening white and snow flakes as big as anything adding to this picture all the time.

But go outside and it’s a different story. I went out this afternoon to get my regular Sunday newspapers and my fingers became numb to the bone and my jacket and trousers literally got covered in the stuff. Also, it was difficult to wheel along the road in almost blizzard like conditions but I made it to the shop and safely back!

According to forecasters (such as WeatherWatch’s Philip Duncan), these conditions are set to remain with us for up to four days. I can remember snow events across multiple days occurring many times within my lifetime and indeed the lifetimes of most of us. What makes this storm more significant than even the July event (and of any in recent times) is its forecast scale. This event is so significant that Wellington - I can’t believe it - is even forecast to receive snow dumps to sea level! Even Auckland has a chance of seeing the white stuff for the first time since 1939!

And it is the 1939 event that we should compare this storm to. This week could see the most severe winter weather in New Zealand since that year. Many people aged 75 years and over in Dunedin remember the massive snow event of July that year which brought snow drifts of up to 10 centimeters (and above) in the city. The same system that battered Dunedin produced the first recorded snowstorm to have struck Auckland.

This week we stand to see those records broken, perhaps even shattered. We could be living in an historic weather moment that will cause disruption the length and breadth of the country. The pictures that we see on television every southern summer of our northern counterparts facing massive disruption due to snow could be played out here. While weather events like snow storms do make the news in this country, this one will be the grandaddy of them all from a New Zealand perspective.

So, hunker down New Zealand! The Great Snow Storm of 2011 (as it will come to be called) is here. If it hasn’t arrived on your doorstep yet, it soon will! And you will then be able to know what it’s like to live in Dunedin!

See also Roger Pielke Sr.’s post on this event and Australia’s Steven Sherwood’s claim there would be no more snow due to climate change.