DAS has expanded its weather data capabilities through a partnership with MetService, integrating additional weather stations from their Fire Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) data partners. This collaboration significantly improves our weather monitoring system, providing a more comprehensive and accurate dataset.
Our ETL team successfully loaded 300+ weather stations across New Zealand, incorporating this data into rainfall charts and annual datasets. However, due to data quality concerns, not all stations were included in the final dataset.
To ensure consistency and accuracy, we implemented Kriging with External Drift (KED)—a sophisticated spatial interpolation technique that:
Uses observed data from available weather stations
Leverages long-term rainfall rasters as a ‘Drift Surface’ to maintain realistic rainfall patterns and minimize anomalies
Incorporates the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) to adjust for current climate conditions, including El Niño, La Niña, or Neutral phases
This interpolation method allows us to replace missing or inaccurate values with scientifically validated interpolated data, ensuring a seamless, reliable supply of weather insights. As a result, DAS users benefit from:
✓ Increased weather station coverage, improving proximity to accurate weather data
✓ More detailed and reliable rainfall charts for trend analysis
✓ Improved risk assessments by integrating fire, flood, and climate insights
Whenever interpolated data is used in charts, a disclaimer appears in the bottom right to indicate the data sources utilized.
For more details on how DAS interpolates weather data in New Zealand, visit:
👉 How is Weather Data Interpolated in New Zealand?
February 2025 DAS Weather Data Release Improvements Summary
MetService supplied DAS with data from:
319 stations in February 2025
265 stations were included in the DAS release (+130 stations, nearly doubling coverage from January 2025)
54 stations were temporarily excluded due to vendor data quality issues. These will be added once missing historical data is backfilled and quality meets our standards.
Impact of the Expansion:
Median distance from a property center to the nearest weather station decreased from 17,756m to 13,189m → a 25.7% improvement in proximity to weather data.
The expanded dataset enhances rainfall insights, risk analysis, and climate trend forecasting across New Zealand.
Below is a visual representation of the 135 previously supplied stations (in grey) and the 130 newly integrated FENZ stations (in green).
This update represents a significant enhancement in DAS's weather data coverage, improving the accuracy and reliability of climate insights available to our users.