South Australia has so far escaped the worst of the drought despite a parched July but forecasters say an emerging El Nino system could prolong the big dry.
With good rainfall over the past week, Adelaide has now had 286 millimetres for the year so far, about 85 per cent of the average.
Some areas of the state including the far west coast and the southeast are doing even better but areas towards the north are experiencing conditions well below average.
Senior climatologist with the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide Darren Ray said rainfall had been sporadic across the state this season.
It's meant the outlook for farmers is heavily dependent on whether they've been lucky enough to get rain.
And conditions are likely to remain dry into spring and summer, Mr Ray said.
"We're watching indications of an El Nino event developing in the Pacific Ocean," he said.
"It hasn't ticked over the threshold yet but the dry conditions we're seeing at the moment are pretty typical of an El Nino event."
In an El Nino system, warm water in the Pacific moves away from the Australian coast, generally reducing rainfall across the southeast of the country.
Mr Ray said the system was expected to fully develop during spring and would likely persist until autumn.
He said that could mean much of the drought-affected areas in NSW and Queensland would need to wait until the pattern broke down, well into 2019, for some relief.
The lower than average rainfall across Adelaide has impacted on the city's reservoir levels with water storage tracking well below last year.
SA Water says levels are at 54 per cent of capacity across the 10 reservoirs compared to 73 per cent at this time in 2017.
Some smaller catchments are close to full including the Hope Valley and Happy Valley reservoirs but Mt Bold has just 35 per cent and Kangaroo Creek just 20 per cent.
