Two of New Zealand's major cities received a chilly winter blast on Tuesday morning with snow falling in Wellington and Christchurch.
Snow began falling in the early hours of Tuesday morning across the Wellington region, mainly in Upper Hutt, Transmission Gully and the CBD.
Videos on social media showed snow started falling in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn just before 5am, while a commutator driving on Transmission Gully at 3:30am posted a video showing a flurry of snow falling.
As the morning progressed, there were reports of snow in the suburbs of Karori, Johnsonville and Churton Park, according to MetService.
Wellington Regional Emergency Management tweeted: "Snow joke...it's really SNOWING in Wellington!"
The weather is meant to improve in the Capital on Tuesday afternoon but it will still be chilly. At 1pm, the MetService website said it was 7.2 degrees but only felt like four.
In the South Island, snow was falling fairly heavily in Christchurch at around 7am on Tuesday.
"We are out in western Christchurch in Templeton and it's certainly started to slow down for the moment being," reporter Mitch Redman told AM on Tuesday.
"We are hearing reports that snow is quite heavy out in the north Canterbury way towards the Pegasus township and also further up the Port Hills. Obviously, the snow has now stopped at sea level but up at higher altitudes, it's still falling."
Pictures captured snow settling on top of vehicles throughout Christchurch. The last time there was enough snow settled in the city was way back in 2013. Before then, there were large dumplings of snow in 2012, 2011, 2006 and 2002.
WeatherWatch said the light snow flurries are the first ones in a decade to settle in all three major centres.
But the cold blast is not going to last, with the light snow flurries clearing on Tuesday morning and moving up the east of the North Island.
"This means more snow showers (and hail and sleet) are possible today on both SH1 the Desert Road and SH5 the Napier-Taupo highway," WeatherWatch said. "In true spring style it's short lived - with milder days coming up."
MetService said the cold blast will see large parts of the country struggle to reach double digits in temperatures on Tuesday and it won't improve on Wednesday morning.
Almost all of the country will be below the September average minimum temperature on Wednesday, MetService said.
