The South Island is having a taste of Winter today thanks to a cold southerly.  Temperatures have hovered around 6 degrees in Southland, Otago and parts of Canterbury but the Weather Watch Centre’s head weather analyst Philip Duncan says it feels much colder.  “Dunedin, Queenstown and Invercargill all have a strong southerly making the wind chill feel more like zero or 1 degrees”.

Further north and Christchurch has been in the higher single digits but again a cold southerly is making it feel more like the low single digits. 

Duncan says the cold snap was expected to blast all of New Zealand but a large anticyclone (High) south of Tasmania has slipped into the Southern Ocean, effectively creating a shut off valve to the cold weather.  “That coupled with a deepening low off Northland’s north-east coast is keeping the North Island protected from the cold blast”.