Written By Cerys Gibby
“What happened to summer?” Is the question on the tip of every New Zealander’s tongue. The summer of 2025/2026 seems to have been stickier than usual, complaints of humidity and constant rainfall plaguing r/newzealand on the regular. As university students itching to spend our youths out in the sun, the disappointing weather was just a little bit stink. Some say it was nothing but stock-standard New Zealand weather, while others insist it was completely out of the ordinary. Spoiler alert: it’s a bit of both, and we can thank a mix of climate change and geography for the oppressive heat.
New Zealand will always be humid. We’re a few relatively small sub-tropical islands surrounded by the Pacific Ocean. When heat evaporates water from the ocean, moisture enters the atmosphere. Warm air also means that water vapour condenses, causing humid conditions. Around Christmastime and New Years (a.k.a. when you’re most likely to take time off work and go on holiday (or to RnV)) the ocean’s surface is at its warmest, meaning more water in the atmosphere, more days that are either muggy or rainy, and more storms. So, we should expect some level of humidity and rainfall during the summer, especially in the North Island.
However, that doesn’t mean that there is no reason for concern.
If you felt that this past summer was stickier than usual, you’re not going crazy. If you reside in Tauranga, you would have certainly felt the dew point (a measure of humidity) get to between 20 and 24 degrees Celsius in January. For reference, in New Zealand a comfortable dew point would be between 10 and 15 degrees Celsius. The unusually humid conditions went hand-in-hand with 274 millimeters of rainfall, triggering landslips that tragically took the lives of eight people.
Extreme weather events have been on the rise in New Zealand over the past few years, the Auckland floods of early 2023 followed immediately by Cyclone Gabrielle which devastated parts of the North Island, particularly Hawke’s Bay. While New Zealand isn’t a stranger to summer storms, rising global temperatures mean that the evaporation cycle is really ramping up, leading to more storms than usual. According to RNZ’s 2025 climate summary, “four of the five warmest years on record have occurred since 2021”. New Zealand’s sub-tropical climate and climate change are not mutually exclusive explanations for our increasingly wet summers, but rather two factors converging into the perfect storm. It doesn’t help that over the summer; we experienced La Niña conditions that exacerbated the conditions we were already set up for.
So, what does this mean for you? Unfortunately, summers to come are probably going to be just as, if not more humid. More than just being annoying, we’re also seeing how these conditions and weather events can be extremely dangerous and pose a threat to our communities.
We put out a poll on our Instagram asking people just how chill or cooked their Summer had been. These were the results:
Felt like a Goddamn cooked chicken – 58%
Classic Kiwi Christmas. No Notes. – 41%
…Where’s the ‘I got drenched’ option? – 1%
