It'll be a humid and unsettled summer for New Zealand, one of the country's leading meteorologists says - but he warns drought is still very much on the cards.
Chris Brandolino, NIWA Weather's principal scientist for forecasting, says La Niña's arrival on our shores means the summer months will result in more than usual north-easterly winds, more humidity and more warmth.
It's also likely to bring more showers and thunderstorms, he said, which have been thin on the ground in recent summers.
La Niña is a weather phenomenon whereby equatorial trade winds blow across the Pacific, resulting in cooler than normal sea temperatures. Its opposite, El Niño, was the prevailing weather pattern last year and resulted in drought in Australasia.
But the absence of El Niño and re-emergence of La Niña won't necessarily mean we escape drought in New Zealand this summer, Brandolino warns.
"Dryness has our concern for much of the South Island and lower North Island for the next three months," he told The AM Show's Duncan Garner on Tuesday morning.
"The rainfall for the upper North Island - Bay of Plenty, Tauranga, Auckland, Waikato, Northland - that area we think [will have] near-normal rainfall for the three-month period."
Despite the drier-than-normal winter, however - and the restrictions placed on Aucklanders by Watercare in response to its bare dams - Brandolino says we're not in drought yet.
"We're not in drought at all - there is no meteorological drought," he said.
"There are certainly some areas that are hedging in that direction, but unfortunately the impacts of the drought we saw last year are still ongoing.
"We need rain. For some - like the upper North Island, which is first to see those north-easterlies because it's exposed coming from that direction - there's a better chance of seeing those hit-and-miss showers and thunderstorms."
While it may be a little less settled than normal, the summer conditions are also set to be warmer than usual in the wake of one of the hottest Octobers since records began.
"October was New Zealand's fifth-warmest October on record, going back to 1909, and it was the warmest October on record going back to 2001 - so it was a very warm October," Brandolino said.
"With high confidence, we think the next three months are going to be above-average temperatures country-wide, top to bottom - [although] that doesn't mean there won't be cool days or a cool period.
"We haven't had a below average monthly temperature going pretty darn close to four years now."
Brandolino says NIWA's official summer outlook will be released over the next three to four weeks.
