Welcome to the Venture Southland weather site Well, the complaints about our changing this web page keep rolling in! We've heard from fishermen, farmers, commercial and recreational pilots, agricultural contractors, mine managers, earth-moving contractors, tourism operators (local and overseas), surfies and sun-seekers and those are just some of the correspondents who identified their occupation or how they used the weather information. There are now too many for us to reply to you individually, but please don't take it to mean we don't care or haven't taken note of your feedback. The fact is, it was costing us heaps to purchase the data and put it on line. We struggle to justify that expense to some of our critics when the government is already funding other agencies to provide weather forecasts. Now that we know how popular our weather page was we will continue to look for other ways of meeting the costs, but these things take time. In the meantime, we have added a link to the Southland 10-day regional forecast (see menu at right), which was one of the features most sorely missed. It is actually on the same page of the Met Service site as the Gore & Lumsden Weather. As for the rain radar, if the hourly updates on the Met Service website are insufficient for your needs, you can purchase a 15-minute or a 7½-minute rain radar data feed from the NZ Meteorological Service. Comments on this website are always welcome at info@venturesouthland.co.nz. Southland's climateIn general Southland has a cool temperate climate. In the populated and intensively farmed parts of the region mean daily temperatures range from around 5ºC in July to14ºC in January. There can be around 80 days of ground frost in the winter months and 1000mm of rainfall fairly evenly spread throughout the year. Wind speed averages 15–20km/hr and there are about 1600 hours of sunshine annually. In the alpine areas and over in Fiordland the climate is more extreme. | 
