New Zealand: When is the best time to visit?

When is the best time to visit

First, you really have to pay attention to the direction of the wind. Now while this won't help you a whole lot in pre-trip planning, you'll come to find out that the wind direction means everything in terms of the weather you're likely to face on a day-by-day hour-by-hour basis. Speaking of which, since the wind direction is subject to frequent changes, this also means that the New Zealand weather is just as changeable. The saying that you can experience four seasons in a day is no joke. We even experienced such a thing when we visited the Doubtful Sound back in late November 2004.

So how should you relate wind with the weather?

Well, here's my take on it based on our experiences.

Think of the oceans as rain makers and the mountains as barriers. For example, if you have a westerly, northerly, or northwesterly, and you're say on the West Coast of the South Island, you can expect rain. But by the same token, on the leeward sides of the Southern Alps under those same wind conditions, it can still be fine weather depending on how strong the storms that originated from the Tasman Sea were.

If you get winds coming from the south, you could expect Antarctic cold and nasty weather coming from the Southern Ocean and slamming the South Island while also hitting Wellington on the North Island with some biting wind chills as well.

The second thing to consider is the seasons. New Zealand is in the Southern Hemisphere so their seasons are opposite ours in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus, June through August is Winter, September through November is Spring, December through February is Summer, and March through May is Autumn. And since they're in a temperate climate, the seasonal weather you'd expect (like Winter snows, Summer heat waves, Spring showers, etc.) more or less hold true.

However, in our experiences, we've observed that the fine weather in the South Island doesn't really kick in until say mid- to late January (i.e. mid Summer) and goes through March. But the North Island seems to have a little more benign weather (maybe that's why the South Island is so sparesely populated compared to the North Island). They tend to get a lot of rain in this country, which might explain why the country's so green (yet sometimes frustratingly extends the Winter and Spring weather well into January).

If I had to make an analogy with a more familiar American example, think of New Zealand as having a similar climate to that of the Pacific Northwest like say Oregon or Washington. That's because they're in the Roaring 40s in their respective sides of the hemisphere. However, you could argue New Zealand has more variable weather due to the fact that it sits on a pair of major islands so they also get island weather (like Hawaii).

So in conclusion, if it's waterfalls you're after, then the best time to visit New Zealand is when the climate is generally wet. And this is generally from October through December or January. This may be especially true between the November to December time frame where the snowmelt also helps to fuel alpine waterfalls. But even with that said, you can still experience foul weather at any time of the year.

However, we confess that sometimes it's nice to break up the rainy and overcast weather with some fine days. On our first trip in November '04, we counted no more than 6 or 7 rain free days out of 28. On our latest trip in December '09 and January '10, we only got about 6 rain free days in the South Island (out of 15 days) and mostly rain free days (say 6 out of 7) in the North Island.

We'd reckon that the highest likelihood of true Summer weather happens between mid- to late January and goes through March (as stated somewhere earlier above).

For climate and almanac data (i.e. temperatures, rainfall, sunshine hours, etc.) from NIWA's website, click here.

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