The North Island’s big wet summer shows no sign of abating, with more heavy rain forecast for storm-ravaged Coromandel and Gisborne today - and showers for Auckland, Northland, Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay.
Weather authorities are also keeping a close watch on two tropical lows - one near Fiji and another in the Coral Sea - which have the potential to form into cyclones.
MetService has issued heavy rain warnings for Gisborne from 3am and Coromandel from 9am today - with the possibility of thunderstorms and localised downpours and peak rainfall of 25-40mm per hour.
Those two regions continue to clean up from the devastating Cyclone Gabrielle.
This will be unwelcome news for the already battered Northland and Auckland regions, which experienced another deluge on Friday.
More than 200 people were stranded on Friday at schools, camps, in their cars and strangers’ homes as torrential rain and plunging temperatures brought hailstones, slips and flooding in Mangawhai.
The Brynderwyns detour via Kaiwaka-Mangawhai Rd was closed due to massive slips and flooding, causing Northland to be left essentially isolated from the rest of the country.
Doolin said this week would be a “seesaw” across the nation, with rain in the north today and tomorrow, and sunshine in the south.
The South Island was “continuing to see largely pretty nice weather” and that was going to continue for the early part of the week.
“However, they are going to see, in sort of the middle of next week, a front push across them, which means conditions are going to deteriorate.”
The West Coast was most likely to be affected, he said.
The weather will start to improve for the North Island at that time.
Wellington will be neither the best off, nor the worst off, he said, and will experience a little bit of everything.
MetService meteorologists are closely monitoring a weather system near Fiji, which has the potential to turn into another tropical cyclone, but say it's too early to know whether that would happen, or whether New Zealand will be affected.
They said a pair of tropical cyclones may form in the South Pacific next week, with a potential risk of more rain and swells for eastern parts of New Zealand.
“There is a low risk today of it forming a tropical cyclone,” Doolin said.
That risk would pick up to “moderate” in the coming days, though.
Doolin also noted the existence of another low over the Coral Sea that was “poorly organised at the moment” and had a potential to intensify into a tropical cyclone.
But it was still too far off to make solid predictions on either weather system, or their movements.
“We’re talking quite long range now for a system that’s not even being called a tropical cyclone. The really long-range projections at the moment have this system kind of moving east of the country a bit, quite far east ... but we need to emphasise a lot of uncertainty. Over the next several days we will have a lot more certainty.”
