Plants and trees along the water margins and banks are called riparian vegetation. A riparian buffer zone is a vegetated strip of land along the margins of a waterway. Riparian vegetation provides a ...

NIWA maintains the national climate database for New Zealand, and can supply data in a variety of ways. The National Climate Database is an archive of climate observations which in some places extend ...

The projections came from the latest suite of global climate models – called the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6, or CMIP6. The six models used, which fed into the most recent IPCC ...

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. These maps (click for full sized versions) are updated daily and are based on data from our National Climate ...

We are constantly bombarded with information, stories and images of our changing global climate – and of the more extreme changes we can expect in the future. The problem can feel immense – but it ...

NIWA's High Intensity Rainfall Design System (HIRDS) offers planners and engineers more certainty about the frequency of high-intensity rainfall events, enabling them to better design stormwater ...

Maps of average annual rainfall, temperature and several other climate variables have been produced for all of New Zealand, based on the 30-year period 1981–2010. These are useful for tasks such as ...

How healthy is your stream? SHMAK - the New Zealand Stream Health Monitoring and Assessment Kit - has been designed to help you find out. NIWA’s Stream Health Monitoring Assessment Kit (SHMAK) gives ...

The 3-panel Soil Moisture Deficit (SMD) map shows the historical soil moisture deficit at the date shown (left), the soil moisture deficit at the same time last year (middle) and the current soil ...

NIWA and MPI are working together to develop a new drought forecasting tool. It uses innovative climate modelling, the latest in machine learning and other data-driven techniques to predict rainfall ...

Almost half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Methane (CH 4) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O) are the two main agricultural greenhouse gases. Methane makes up the majority of ...

Anyone can use the tool and provide data by using the survey available in the NIWA Citizen Science app. The survey/app provides a standardized way to record data on the characteristics of instream ...