140000 lambs per day

that's how many are born each day around this time of year, just in Otago and Southland, according to this article, which sounds about right considering the number of sheep around there. Putting the numbers like that makes for a pretty astounding figure!

1 day in the last two weeks

did not get at least 1mm of rain. This is in Ruakura, Hamilton (the closest weather station). I'm now thoroughly sick of the rain...

Since the beginning of August, i.e. 51 days, there have only been 12 days without rain. That doesn't sound all that bad at first, but it does mean more than 3 out of every 4 days has been raining.

Rainfall variability...

I know, I'm back to the weather. That's life.

Hamilton, in general, is pretty much guaranteed to have a wet winter - that's just the way it is. Rainfall really is quite reliable here: between 1990 and 2010, the lowest monthly rainfall in June was 86mm in 2005, the highest 222mm this year. In other words, June will always be wet. You can register with NIWA if you're really keen!

Brisbane on the other hand, as with most of Australia, tends to have rather variable rainfall year to year. In just the last 10 years, the total rainfall in June has varied between 6mm this year to 121mm in 2008. Interestingly though, Brisbane's total rainfall tends to roughly even out - the lowest annual rainfall in the last 10 years was 652mm in 2007, the highest 1240mm in 2008, which isn't an extreme variation like the monthly totals can be. Numbers from BOM

85200 cars...

were stolen in Australia last year. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it.

Source: ABS (again!)

1.13 million Kiwis...

Headed over the ditch to Australia in the past year, for "short-term visits", i.e. a holiday. Fairly remarkably, almost the exact same number of Aussies (1.12 million) headed over this side of the ditch. They're both each other's biggest sources of tourists, which is kind of understandable seen as they're a long way from most other countries.

Sources: Tourism NZ and ABS

P.S. I wonder how many of those "tourist numbers" are actually business trips... I imagine there's an awful lot of them, considering how close Aus and NZ are economically...

Nissan Silvia

Is apparently the most commonly stolen car model in NZ...

Source

First day of spring!

Well, this isn't really a statistic, but it is noteworthy!

Hopefully I'll get back to some more statistics one day soon...