For those of you hoping for a dry weekend, I wish I had better news for you.

But it appears that a couple of weather systems will combine forces to make this a pretty wet weekend for most of New Zealand.

Right now, it looks like Saturday will be the wettest day.  Low pressure to the southwest and low pressure to the northwest will combine to spread rain across the country.

For the North Island, it looks like the morning and much of the afternoon will be dry.  However, late afternoon and into the evening are expected to be pretty wett.  Winds will also increase as the system pushes across Northland and Auckland late Saturday night.  Gale force winds are not expected, but we will monitor the development of the system.

Much of the South Island will likely see rain as early as late Saturday morning.  The exceptions being for eastern regions.  So Christchurch and Dunedin  may not get wet until the afternoon.

On Sunday, the weather system will pull away from us.  That will mean that not all of Sunday will be wet.  In fact, by late afternoon much of the country should be dry.

After that, we could have a few days in a row of fairly settled weather.

Photo by Mike Condon

By WeatherWatch Analyst Howard Joseph