Hurricane Sandy washed away the remnants of drought in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, although half the country remains parched and many of the hardest-hit areas saw little improvement this week.

Five percent of the Northeast is categorized as abnormally dry in the latest U.S. Drought Monitor released this morning, down from 14 percent last week, when the area also saw some moderate and severe drought.

But the storm's rains reached only so far. Parts of North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama showed increases in low-level drought this week.

Overall, 50 percent of the country is in moderate drought or worse, down slightly from 52 percent last week. At the same time, the percentage of the nation suffering exceptional drought increased incrementally to 5 percent.

Oklahoma saw a slight expansion of extreme drought with some areas having now gone 30 days without rain, said Drought Monitor author Michael Brewer, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center. Dry conditions remained unchanged in the hardest-hit contiguous states of Nebraska, Kansas and South Dakota.

Brad Rippey, a meteorologist for the Department of Agriculture, said the map showed slight improvements for crops. Hay in drought dipped 2 percentage points from last week to 62 percent, and cattle in drought fell slightly to 69 percent, he said.

Winter wheat in drought continued to shrink this week as well, but drought still covers nearly two-thirds of the production area. In some of the hardest-hit areas, winter wheat has been extremely slow to emerge and the crop is running out of time until cold weather sets in permanently, Rippey said. The first winter wheat condition report of the season, released Sunday, rated 15 percent of the U.S. winter wheat as very poor to poor, although in South Dakota and Nebraska the percentages were considerably higher.