Hurricane Sandy has doused all patches of drought that remained between Maryland and New York state, the latest U.S. Drought Monitor finds.

As of Tuesday, close to 5 percent of the Northeast is in abnormally dry conditions, down from 13.7 percent of the area last week. There was no drought at all in the region, down from 4.2 percent in moderate drought and 0.5 percent in severe drought last week.

Though these were never areas of intense drought like the Midwest, where the corn crop dwindled in the harsh heat, Sandy brought enough rain to keep out extreme dryness at least until next year, said Michael Brewer, author of this week's Drought Monitor and a climatologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center.

"Where it did fall, it did benefit," he said. But even a storm of Sandy's proportion would not have erased drought in the nation's hardest-hit states; 60.2 percent of the lower 48 states is covered in drought, down from last week's 61.8 percent.

The storm, whose effects covered the most densely populated region of the United States, seems to have done relatively little damage to farming and livestock, according to analysts. While most of the cash crops hurt by the drought -- corn and soybeans -- have been harvested, the ongoing lack of water has been worrisome for winter wheat growers, who will need a good rain to sprout the seed and raise the crop before temperatures drop below freezing and wheat enters the winter dormancy period.

"If the same storm went through Texas, you may have a different story," Brewer said. The center of the continental United States, from the Texas Panhandle through South Dakota, remains in a zone of moderate to exceptional drought. Had the storm passed there, the severely dehydrated soils would not have had the capacity to absorb so much water so quickly, and much of it would have skimmed the surface of the soil as runoff. While Sandy brought heavy rains onto coastal North Carolina and Florida, it did nothing to reverse the exceptional drought in Georgia.

Time is ticking for winter wheat

Remnants of Sandy did hit the Ohio River Valley and parts of Indiana, but that part of the eastern Corn Belt had already seen some relief with regular precipitation since late September.

"We're trending towards the right direction in the Midwest but still having problems over the Plains," said Alex Sosnowski, an agricultural meteorologist at Accuweather.com.

Currently, 65 percent of winter wheat grown in the United States is experiencing drought, according to the Agriculture Department's World Agricultural Outlook Board.

In Nebraska, a state nearly 80 percent covered in exceptional drought, the crop is about two weeks late to emerge from its seed.

Growers are still keeping hopes up for rain, said Caroline Brauer, public information officer for Nebraska Wheat. There is still time for crops to flourish, she said, but it all depends on a good, timely freeze this winter, with plenty of snow and rain in the springtime.

"A lot of farmers planted in dry soil, hoping for rain," Brauer said. "There's really no surplus moisture in any of [the fields]."