NZ March Madness: Tropical Cyclone URMIL, a cold change and a 'mountain range of high pressure'

March often brings in some wild changes in our weather - and we do have both a tropical cyclone north of NZ and a brief polar southerly moving up eastern NZ as we go into Sunday and early next week. But despite those big systems, the main feature of New Zealand's weather over the coming week will be mostly high pressure and drier skies. In fact by the middle to later part of next week one anticyclone centred east of NZ may stretch from Sydney, over the Tasman Sea and NZ, out past the Chathams and the International Date Line and extend almost 7000km across from west to east. It's like a mountain range of high pressure it's so large. The tropical cyclone near Vanuatu has now formed (as of Friday Feb 27) - but at the time of recording this it was yet to be officially named by the Fiji Met Service. On Friday afternoon it was officially named Tropical Cyclone URMIL. We've done some research and from what we can see this is the South Pacific's latest ever first named tropical cyclone. The previous latest first named storm to develop was Cyclone Bart on Feb 21st in 2017. The Fiji Met Service expects Cyclone Urmil to remain mostly at sea and to reach Category 2, with air pressure down to about 970hPa at the centre. The tracking of this tropical cyclone does carry it over NZ waters, but it should remain far enough from land to not affect our weather significantly, but it is in a position to definitely keep an eye on.