MetService meteorologist Alec Holden said despite a brief respite tomorrow morning, the weather ahead looked grim.
"The good question that I’ve had a lot of people ask is: ‘Where’s summer gone?"’ Mr Holden said.
"Where’s it gone? It’s off for its own summer holiday.
"Your head bobs up for a nice little break in the morning of Tuesday before you’re immediately dunked back down into southerlies, unfortunately.
"Maybe if you want to go for a bit of a morning surf on Tuesday, that might sound like not a terrible idea.
"But otherwise, yeah, it’s definitely a good idea to keep a jumper within arm’s length."
The middling weather was brought about by a pair of aggravating factors at play, he said.
First, New Zealand was "stuck out in the middle of the ocean" and summery, warm temperatures were dependent on the ocean warming up, which typically took until later in the summer to happen.
The second aggravating factor this summer was a large high-pressure system to the east of the country that had been in place for quite a while.
"What that has resulted in is more or less a pile-up of low-pressure systems just east of us.
"Normally, they would move over us and then just continue on their merry way.
"However, they’ve gotten stuck there, and since they spin clockwise, it means that they are dragging a lot of southerly air up on to the country, which is producing those depressed temperatures, rainy conditions - just really unsummery weather systems."
At Dunedin Airport yesterday it reached 18°C, while in the city it only managed 14.5°C.
The average high for this month was 21.1°C, Mr Holden said.
Tomorrow morning a ridge of high pressure would move over Dunedin and bring fine weather for the first half of the day.
"And then after that, it’s a return to some showers and southwesterly flow, and with that the temperatures dip back down again," he said.
By Friday, temperatures would max out at 18°C in the city, he said.
In Napier and the Central Plateau, with some very cold air overhead, snow flurries were reported yesterday.
And for Dunedin it was looking "a touch hairy" on Wednesday morning "but in terms of the very worst, the absolute worst that you’ll probably see, from what I can tell is some dustings on the nearby ranges".
The weekend weather was not yet clear, he said.
