Northern Australia's annual wet season seems to have gone missing in action with cattle stations across the Top End starting to stress.
Last month was one of the north's driest Februarys on record and this month is looking just as bad.
"The wet season can only be described as disappointing," said cattle producer Justin Dyer from Hayfield Station in the Northern Territory.
"We thought with the La Niña weather system we'd get at least an average wet season but it's as dry as I've seen it here [at this time of year].
"So we've started mustering to take advantage of the good cattle prices and bunker down to what's probably going to be a tough end to the dry season."
Mr Dyer said Hayfield Station had received just under 225 millimetres since October and that most cattle producers in the Top End were "well under half their average rainfall".
"I worry about our feed costs, it's going to be pretty massive this year," he said.
Nearby at Hidden Valley Station, cattleman Roley James said there were already a bunch of Top End stations fighting bushfires and pumping a lot of water for stock.
"I don't think we've seen a wet season quite like this one," he said.
Thirsty crops
Around Katherine, mango grower Mitchael Curtis said his farm had recorded about 60 millimetres since the start of February.
"We've had to keep watering our mango trees throughout the wet season. Normally we don't need to turn the pump on," he said.
Meanwhile, thousands of hectares of the NT's dry-land cotton is also feeling the stress of a poor wet season.
After a promising start, growers in the Daly and Katherine regions are now in need of decent rain to finish off the crop, due to be harvested around June.
Is this the last chance?
Northern Australia's wet season traditionally stretches from October 1 to April 30, so time is running out.
The north's best chance for a monsoonal burst appears to be in the next fortnight with the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) forecast to move into the region.
Senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, Greg Browning, said a lot of good rain-producing systems "had gone AWOL" this wet season.
"We are obviously getting towards the end of the wet season but there's still some hope, " he said.
"We have seen the MJO strengthen in recent days and it's forecast to move over our region which increases the chances of rainfall.
"Some of the climate models are suggesting it could be quite wet across much of the Territory over the next month or so, but it's still a little far out to say whether we will see a monsoon flow make its way into the NT and down into those [cattle stations] that have seen such dry conditions."
