Will forecast rain be enough for Hawke's Bay?

January-June rainfall at Hawke's Bay Airport, just north of Napier, is the second-lowest first-half total on record.

Hawke's Bay is officially in one of its driest winters on record according to details issued by MetService yesterday.

Auckland-based meteorologist Georgina Griffiths, the MetService "local" specialist for Hawke's Bay, said that January-June rainfall at Hawke's Bay Airport, just north of Napier, is the second-lowest first-half total on record.

In comparable records dating back to 1950, only January-June 1998 was drier, but nothing in other records suggests any other drier January-June previously in the region.

It's the third year in a row that January-June rainfall has been below the historic average, calculated over 30 years of statistics. By 9am yesterday, after the end of the first night following the winter solstice, there had been just 1mm of rain in the first three weeks of June, which Ms Griffiths said was "almost unheard of."

But she doesn't see the 6mm record low for June being broken. She's forecasting a small amount of rain by the weekend, and a "good chance" of more next week, but nothing of flood proportion.

It is the long-term lack of rain that is worrying farmers. The 202mm of rain recorded this year up to 9am yesterday was just a tick over half the January-June average of 396mm.

The trend continues into Northern Hawke's Bay, where the 159.3mm recorded at Mahia was less than 50 per cent of the January-June average, and into parts of eastern Central Hawke's Bay.

But it's not just the lack of rain that's perplexing weather-watchers - temperatures are also significantly warmer than average.

Temperatures at Hawke’s Bay Airport from 6am just before dawn on Tuesday to mid-morning yesterday.

Temperatures rose above those of the shortest day on Tuesday. The airport's 15C at 10am yesterday was the coldest in almost 24 hours, and just below the overnight minimum of 15.3C recorded between 1am and 2am. The average mean temperature has been up every month this year and last month was the warmest May on record at 2.9C above average. The 25.1C maximum on June 10 was the hottest June temperature on record at the station, although some night-time minimum temperatures have hovered around zero.

February was the second-warmest February on record, and the previous month the third-warmest January on record.

Federated Farmers Hawke's Bay provincial president Will Foley has echoed farmer concerns in a column today in The Country (Hawke's Bay Today page 24) comparing the situation with fears 12 months ago of an east coast drought and one of "the worst El Nino summers we've had".

By early February it was a "normal" Hawke's Bay summer again, but the succeeding months had seen a "very dry" period running later into June.