More hardship for Christchurch

Life is hard enough for people trying to recover from the earthquakes, but the recent weather that has brought record lows has made things that much harder

Christchurch: Coldest day on record

Cantabrians expecting to wake to another bone-chilling morning can at least take comfort from official figures showing that Wednesday was Christchurch's coldest day on record.

the Press,

8 June, 2012

Further chaos and disruption is expected on roads this morning after temperatures dipped several degrees below freezing overnight.

The cold snap is a hangover from Wednesday's heavy snow, when the maximum temperature at Christchurch Airport in the official 24-hour period from 9am that day reached a pitiful 0.4 degrees Celsius.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) said that was the city's lowest day maximum in nearly 149 years of record-keeping.

Until Wednesday, the record was the daily maximum of 1.2C measured in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens on July 22, 1918.

While readings began in the gardens in 1863, figures have only been taken at the airport since 1954, where the previous coldest day maximum was 1.7C on August 28, 1992, during that year's big snow.

Early yesterday morning the mercury dipped to -5.8C at the airport, only slowly rising above freezing after 11am and peaking around 4.9C at 1pm before falling below freezing again by 5pm.

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