All up, 120mm fell in the 24 hours from 7am Saturday. “Rain starts to feel heavy when it’s more than 5mm an hour so to have 66mm in two hours is absolutely torrential,” Lyons said. “This sort of flooding has happened before, but if we keep getting weather events like this we need to look at what we can do to prevent it. Lyons said the weather would get considerably more settled heading into Monday, with sunny skies likely and some passing cloud. Lyons said the chance of thunderstorms reoccurring this week was looking very unlikely with the prevailing weather pattern.

Source: New Zealand Herald January 04, 2026 00:40 UTC