Just when it looked like it would be 47 days since a single drop was recorded in Adelaide's official weather station at West Terrace/ngayirdapira, a band of light rain moved through, stopping the rainless streak at 46 days.

It wasn't much, but the 0.4 mm that fell around 8:30 am on Thursday meant that:

• It was the city's 8th-longest rainless spell on record.
• For the record, the longest was 69 days way back in 1893, a streak that – like the current one – also extended through the months of January, February, and March.

It doesn't seem like that long ago that we were writing about the heaviest rain in 75 years in parts of South Australia or running stories with the headline "Yet another soaking for Adelaide".

But after a wet first half of summer, the rain taps in southern SA well and truly turned off towards the end of January, which is well illustrated in the last few bars of the 12-month rainfall graph which you can find on the Adelaide weather page on our desktop site.

Interestingly, the normally parched northeast of the state saw some decent rain in February thanks to tropical moisture tracking south from Queensland, but many other parts of the state had their lowest or equal-lowest rain on record, Adelaide included.

Source: BoM.

While another 1.2 mm fell in the city up till noon on Thursday with similar falls in the Adelaide Hills, the Murraylands, and the Southeast, the question now is when we'll see some serious rain that is more than just a tease for thirsty gardens.

What Adelaide and the whole of southeastern SA needs is a classic cold front out of the southwest bringing moist unstable air from the Southern Ocean, but there is no sign of that sort of weather system on the immediate horizon.