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PHOENIX - Arizona's drought condition is heading into its 12th year and there doesn't appear to be any immediate end in sight.

Snowpack in the state's mountains totals 38 percent of what it should be right now, with some of the poorest conditions on the Salt and Verde rivers.

Survey crews last week found less than 6 inches of snow at several locations and even less at others.

Weather experts expected more moisture in Arizona once El Niño developed last fall in the equatorial Pacific.

On the Colorado River, which supplies the state with about one-third of its water each year, snowpack levels hover near normal.

A series of storms last month walloped the Rocky Mountains but most of the snow wound up on Denver's Front Range and points east.

El Niño typically fuels storms later in the season for Arizona, but experts say it's unlikely to make much of a dent in the space of one or two months.

"Winter would have to be significantly wetter than normal just to give us a normal runoff," said Tony Haffer, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service in Phoenix. "It took us 10 years to get to the state we're in. We're not going to get out of it overnight."

The Natural Resources Conservation Service tracks snowpack with a network of automated sites and a twice-monthly survey by crews who climb to some of the more remote areas of the high country. The first January report will depict bleak conditions for runoff.

"The snowpack has just not developed," said Larry Martinez, water supply specialist for the service's Arizona office. "Right now, we're going to show below-normal streamflow projections through spring. The ace in the hole is El Niño, but we don't know what it's going to do."

Haffer said El Niño continues to influence weather conditions and could begin to steer storms toward Arizona.

"The question is whether it's going to get over the mountains," he said. "We're hopeful it will be the beginning of a wet period."