KEY POINTS:
Farmers and economists will have breathed a sigh of relief as rain hit the east coast of the North Island during the past few days but for the South Island it's shaping up as a dry summer.
Drought is estimated to have cost the New Zealand dairy sector
$1.4 billion last summer - a price the economy can ill afford this year with gross domestic product already in decline.
Parts of the East Coast have been on drought watch but finally got some rain at the weekend with more predicted in some parts.
Gisborne has now had almost 1.5 times the average total January rainfall so far at 82mm, Wairoa is on about a quarter of the norm at 26mm and Hawkes Bay has had 10 per cent of average rainfall at 5mm.
Jim Salinger, a principal scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said a relatively neutral weather pattern had moved towards La Nina during December.
"So the expectation is that this raises the cyclone risk slightly over northern New Zealand," Salinger said.
"There's a better chance [of rain] for the northeast of the North Island, Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, exactly as we've seen over the last weekend."
La Nina was the weather pattern that gripped New Zealand last summer, forcing farmers to sell off stock and causing back-ups at meat works. But its return does not mean the country is facing the same weather as last year with each season having its own peculiarities, Salinger said.
"It's a different sort of La Nina," he said.
"This one - there's more moisture in the tropics that'll come down over us, or down over the north and east of New Zealand."
However, much of the South Island was expected to be dry from January to March, Salinger said.
The outlook was for normal or above normal rainfall in the north and east of the North Island from January to March, with below normal rainfall for much of the South Island, including Canterbury, Otago, Southland and the West Coast.
"It's sort of up to farmers to define drought but certainly the dryness. In the east of the South Island that's where I'd be looking," he said.
The La Nina pattern was expected to last until autumn.