Aucklander Chris Weissenborn shot this video of lightning and thunder over Auckland at around 5am on Sunday.

More than 2000 Auckland homes lost power overnight as the region was battered by strong thunderstorms and wind overnight.

MetService meteorologist Rob Kerr said the storm was "very, very intense".

Send us you photos or videos of the storm newstips@stuff.co.nz



The northern region was hit by more than 10,000 lightning strikes on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, with over 1300 occurring in the Auckland area. The storm also affected the Coromandel, Waikato and Bay of Plenty areas.

JOHN SELKIRK/FAIRFAX NZ The City of Sails was hit by over 1300 lightning strikes in Saturday night's storm.

Around 2000 Vector customers lost power overnight, but almost all connections had been restored by the morning. Vector spokesperson Sandy Hodge said the outages were caused by vegetation falling on power lines.

The biggest outage was in Birkenhead, where 1600 households lost power after a tree fell on a powerline.

Hodge said high winds rather than the lightning had caused the outages.

Around 20 households south of Auckland were still without power this morning, according to the Counties Power website. Crews were in the process of restoring power to those addresses.

At least one power box had been hit by lightning. Counties Power was unavailable to comment.

Hauraki Corner resident Chris Weissenborn was woken several times in the night by the thunder.

But he was too busy marvelling at the storm to worry about losing sleep.

"The pure intensity of the storm was really amazing, it's been a while since I've seen a storm like that over Auckland," he said.

Weissenborn even Skyped his parents in England to show them the storm.

The lightning kept Fire Service crews busy by setting off fire alarms across the city. Apart from responding to the false alarms, the Fire Service had had a quiet night, a spokesperson said.

The MetService's Kerr said the storm was caused by a cold front sweeping in and lifting up the warm, wet air that had been hanging over the city.

The cold front brought strong winds of more than 100kmh. Winds were strongest out west, where the exposed Manukau Heads registered the strongests gusts of 128kmh. The Harbour Bridge registered winds of up to 96kmh overnight.

Many of the MetService's rain monitoring stations were knocked out by the lightning, but Kerr said Auckland had seen substantial rain as well. Among the most affected areas was Pukekohe, which had 31mm of rain overnight.



The storm had passed by the morning, with most of Auckland waking to a sunny Sunday morning - although Kerr warned there could be a few showers throughout the day as the cold front moved away. Auckland was in for mild southwesterlies and a high of 19 on Sunday, he said.