It’s been a dry year — most of the region has been in either severe or extreme drought conditions since early spring.

But as of Monday, there’s only a small sliver of northeastern Palm Beach County that remained in moderate drought for the year to date.

South Florida has benefited from a shift in the prevailing winds that allows thunderstorms to soak the east coast instead of the west coast of the state.

“It is much less (of a dry area) than it was a couple weeks ago and even a few months ago,” said Sammy Hadi, a meteorologist at the Miami office of the National Weather Service.

The slow tropics have not been a factor in the drought, Hadi said.

The patterns of the prevailing wind direction have been the source of both the drought and the new surge of rain, he said.

Earlier in the yea

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