It was only back in January that we wrote about South Australia's wettest start to a year since 1984.

Since then, the state has had one or two particularly heavy falls in outback regions, but much of South Australia has experienced below-average rainfall every month.

That's shown pretty clearly in the Weatherzone graph of Adelaide rainfall which you can find by scrolling to the bottom of our detailed Adelaide weather page (light blue is the monthly average, dark blue is how much rain has fallen).

The rainfall deficit also shows up clearly in the Bureau of Meteorology's rainfall anomaly chart for South Australia below in the period from February through April.

For the record, May has also been pretty dry to date, so you can expect more grey and yellow areas when the new graph is available in early June.

But there's some good news ahead – especially for the southeast of the state, which is normally the wettest area.

Rain, or at least the chance of it, is on the forecast for Adelaide and the entire southeast for the next six days. There's nothing exceptionally heavy on the immediate horizon this week, but as the headline to this story says, any rain is good rain for SA right now.

So how much could fall?

The rain will come in two distinct waves. A trough will move across the southeast on Wednesday into Thursday, bringing the high chance of showers in Adelaide on Wednesday afternoon and the chance of a storm.

• Adelaide should see between 5 and 20 mm between now and Friday.

Showers should stick around for most of the week before increasing late in the weekend and into Monday as a strong low pressure system with an injection of Antarctic air gives the whole of southeastern SA a reminder that winter starts next Wednesday.

• Adelaide could see a good, sustained soaking over a period of two or three days early next week, with falls of 30-40 mm possible.

The winter outlook for southeastern SA is for average to slightly-above-average rainfall.