The latest satellite images of New Zealand and the Tasman Sea, straight from the Himawari-9 weather satellite. A new image arrives every 10 minutes. Press play for the last 24 hours, switch to the 7 day replay, or scrub to any moment — the yellow bars mark the coldest, most vigorous cloud tops.
How this map works
Himawari-9 is the Japan Meteorological Agency’s geostationary weather satellite, parked 35,786 km above the equator. It photographs the whole Pacific disc every 10 minutes, day and night. Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) publishes the imagery in near real time, and Newswire reprojects each frame onto a standard map grid so that coastlines, towns and alerts line up exactly. Images typically appear here 20 to 30 minutes after the satellite takes them, and every frame is stamped with the time it was captured, in New Zealand time.
Satellite view and rain radar
A satellite sees cloud from above — fronts, lows, southerlies and ex-tropical cyclones as whole systems, hours before they arrive. A rain radar sees rain from below, right now. They answer different questions and work best together. For where rain is falling this minute, use a rain radar. For what is coming across the Tasman tonight, this page is the view you want.
Why night looks different
After dark there is no sunlight to photograph, so the map switches automatically to the satellite’s infrared camera, which sees heat instead of light. Brighter grey means higher, colder cloud tops. Yellow through red marks the very coldest tops, which often signal the most vigorous weather. Cold winter land can also glow pale in infrared — that is normal physics, not fog.
How accurate the cloud positions are
New Zealand sits near the edge of Himawari-9’s field of view, so the satellite looks at us from a low angle. Coastlines on this map are exact, but very high cloud can appear displaced 15 to 20 km east-southeast of its true position — an effect called parallax. Keep it in mind when a front looks like it has just reached the coast.
Official warnings
This page is an information tool, not a warning service. Official weather watches and warnings come from MetService, and emergency information comes from NEMA and your local Civil Defence group. When a NEMA alert is active it also appears on the map above.
Explore more live data
Watch the wind that moves this cloud on the NZ wind map, follow tropical storms on the cyclone tracker, or see what else is happening around the country right now — the NZ Right Now dashboard, the live earthquake map, tonight’s aurora forecast and the tide map.