Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown says it's taken MetService "a while" to review its response to the Auckland Anniversary floods and told AM it highlights that "sometimes not everything's the Mayor's fault".
The meteorological agency says its weather forecasting models performed badly before the extreme rainfall that devastated Tamaki Makaurau earlier this year.
The agency said their systems need urgent improvement, with internal staff correspondence revealing disbelief at the inaccuracy of their modelling.
MetService chief executive Stephen Hunt said meteorological models base weather forecasts on how the weather has behaved previously, but the Auckland floods saw an unprecedented amount of moisture in the atmosphere, that made forecasting difficult.
Auckland Mayor Brown and the city's emergency management team were slammed for their response to the floods at the time.
Brown told AM his own emergency staff "made a few blunders", including not having his phone number.
Brown said he was just as surprised as MetService was at the time, because "there was no warning" of what was about to unfold.
"I got a fair caning from the press, including [from] you guys for failing to predict something that the weather forecasters couldn't predict. They told us there was going to be 20ml of rain and there was 20 times what they did [predict]."
The mayor said "it's taken them a while to come good on it" but told AM it would have "been nice if they'd owned up a bit earlier" - regardless he's glad MetService has.
He expected with "all the money and the satellites, and bit and pieces" that MetService could have done better.
"At least now the media might understand that sometimes not everything's the mayor's fault."
Mayor Brown said everyone has learnt from the significant failings, which he's already started to fix.
"We got stuck in and fixed and improved the performance of Auckland's emergency management because it was tested about five days later and it went a lot better," he said.
"So I did manage to make sure that that was fixed quite quickly."
Watch the full interview above for more.
