Water & Atmosphere 20, April 2018

How a regional climate history helped save a farm and cure depression

How long would it take to count all the grains of sand in the world? About 5000 seconds – a little over an hour and 20 minutes – if you had a Cray XC50. NIWA has just installed one at the High Performance Computing Facility in Wellington.

Massive increases in computing power are allowing NIWA scientists to not only analyse more data, faster, but also to envisage completely new experiments.

Less than a week before the official end of summer on 28 February, temperatures dropped and a cool breeze made a whistle-stop tour of the country.

Ruth Beran discovers that public interest in the state of fresh waterways has driven a dramatic change in the tools used by scientists.

NIWA scientists like Leigh Tait were saddened by the human impact of the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, but he also says that it provided a “massive natural history experiment”.

New Zealand’s glaciers have all retreated and lost volume since NIWA started surveying them in 1977.

Efforts to create interest in STEM education (science, technology, engineering and maths) have led to a 40 per cent increase in tertiary students taking the subjects this year.

A hot and steamy summer saw Kiwis heading down to rivers and lakes to cool off. But they weren’t the only ones enjoying the warmer weather – algae had a great time too.

Being prepared to give anything a go and thinking outside the box to get a job done – often in incredibly challenging conditions – is something Bob takes great personal and professional pride in.

As climate change takes hold, regional council planning, sustainability and hazard managers are looking to NIWA.

The first Wednesday of the month finds Philippa Eberlein and her Friends of the Maitai colleagues collecting samples from the Maitai River in Nelson.