It was all Boom! Flash! and Rat-a-tat-tat! around Dunedin on Saturday and it was nothing to do with fireworks.
Several isolated thunderstorms rolled across the city in the middle of the day, sending out lightning and pelting down hailstones as big as marbles and intense bursts of rain.
The St Clair Golf Course was closed about 3pm as golfers rushed to clear the fairways during a 15-minute hailstorm.
Power went out briefly around parts of the city, including at Andersons Bay Countdown, where customers gasped as the store was pitched into darkness for a brief moment, then had to yell at one another to be heard over loud claps of thunder and heavy rain striking the roof above.
Moyles Supermarket in Green Island closed at 3pm after it lost power, reopening at 4.20pm after it was restored.
It was bad news for new lettuce and tomato plants in other parts of town too. Social media posts talked of large hailstones in Balaclava, Calton Hill and Halfway Bush, among other suburbs.
People in Waldronville, Mosgiel, Fairfield and Shiel Hill reported only rain and lightning.
There were also reports of shorter hail storms about 11am.
The storms were not limited to Dunedin — scattered bouts of bad weather also struck as far as Southland.
MetService forecaster Gerard Bellam said there was quite a lot of shower and thunderstorm activity across the east and southeast of the South Island.
There had been "decent-sized hail", which looked to have got up to a marble size.
"The atmosphere was quite unstable yesterday, so we had a sort of cold pool crossing the South Island."
Combined with converging winds as the day heated up, this contributed to the "dramatic thunderstorms" experienced in Canterbury, but also Otago and Southland, he said.
— Staff reporter