The impacts of drought can be substantial, particularly for primary producing nations such as New Zealand. Despite the importance of drought, identifying connections to atmospheric drivers remains a challenge. Vertically integrated water vapour transport (IVT) is critical to understanding the connection between ocean, atmosphere and the land surface, and as such the drivers of drought events. Self‐organizing maps (SOMs) are used here to characterize the spatial patterns of IVT over New Zealand. In turn, the occurrence of these patterns during drought conditions (defined using the standardized precipitation and evapotranspiration index) across New Zealand is then identified and discussed. The resulting classification highlights a collection of high and low IVT magnitude nodes (i.e., spatial patterns). Low IVT nodes occur 40.57% of the time during all drought events and 45.86% during the top 99th percentile events. Conversely, high IVT magnitude nodes occur less frequently during drought events, at 23.77 and 20.96% of the time during all drought events and the top 99th percentile events, respectively. The low IVT nodes are also particularly dominant during summer and autumn season drought events. An increase in the frequency of occurrence of drought‐associated nodes is observed over the course of the study period, which may in part be associated with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)‐driven interannual variability in New Zealand climate. Overall, the results demonstrate the importance of atmospheric circulation‐driven disruptions in moisture transport for drought development, while also providing a first moisture transport weather classification for New Zealand.

Attention is increasingly being turned towards an investigation of extreme hydrometeorological events within the context of land-atmosphere coupling in the wider hydrological cycle, particularly with respect to the identification of compound and seesaw events. To examine these events, accurate soil moisture data are essential. Here, soil moisture from three reanalysis products (ERA5-Land, BARRA and ERA5) are compared to station observations from 12 sites across New Zealand for an average timespan of 18 years. Soil moisture data from all three reanalyses were subsequently used to investigate land-atmosphere coupling with gridded (observational) precipitation and temperature. Finally, compound (co-occurrence of hot and dry) and seesaw (transitions from dry to wet) periods were identified and examined. No best performing reanalysis dataset for soil moisture is evident (min r = 0.78, max r = 0.80). All datasets successfully capture the seasonal and residual component of soil moisture, but not the observed soil moisture trends at each location. Strong coupling between soil moisture and temperature occurs across the predominately energy-limited regions of the lower North Island and entire South Island. Consequently, these regions reveal a high frequency of compound period occurrence and potential shifts in land states to a water limited phase during compound months. A series of seesaw events are also detected for the first time in New Zealand (terminating an average of 17% of droughts), with particularly high frequency of seesaw event occurrence detected in previously identified areas of atmospheric river (AR) activity, indicating the likely wider significance of ARs for drought termination.