Wednesday March 20 is the Autumn Equinox this year, at precisely 4:06pm (the date and time shift around a little each year). This is the point where daytime and nighttime are nearly equal length globally, and in the weeks ahead the nights become longer while the days shorter as the Southern Hemisphere heads towards winter.

High pressure remains over much of NZ today but the centre is now tracking well east of the mainland and will continue to drift away, allowing a small low to form near the South Island on Thursday bringing some western and central rain. The low isn’t big, but it may bring some wet weather to dry parts of NZ.

In some regions rainfall is a bit borderline due to the mountains and ranges breaking up the fairly weak rainclouds – so please keep up to date with your local forecasts at WeatherWatch and RuralWeather for both chance of rain and potential rainfall totals.

Temperatures remain Autumn-like.

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Weather Maps useful today are …

• Cumulative Rainfall next 7 days
• Max Temperatures
• Min Temperatures

Weather Alerts: Now is a good time to set up your wind alerts in our new Alerting App … gusty westerlies are in the forecast off and on next 10 days (basically winds above 30 or 40km/h). Not signed up? Subscribe for free to NZ’s largest weather app! – upgrade for $6.99 a month to customise your own weather alerts for up to 4 different locations. Thank you to the 10,000+ NZers who have already subscribed – we appreciate you supporting our small Kiwi business!

📽️💨↘️➡️↗️Starting this Sunday in the south and spreading further north into next week comes Autumn's windy westerlies. More details in our weather video out today. pic.twitter.com/1nnxNdxMgS

— WeatherWatch.co.nz (@WeatherWatchNZ) March 19, 2024

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• WeatherWatch.co.nz / New Alerting App / RuralWeather.co.nz