California Tries to Refill Its Biggest Reservoir

After the wettest winter in 122 years of record-keeping, California's reservoirs are filling up again, with more than 22 million acre-feet of water in the 46 reservoirs tracked by the state Department of Water Resources (they'd be even fuller if it weren't for flooding worries at the now-infamous Oroville Dam and several other reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills):

The snowpack in the state's mountains, while it hasn't quite broken records across the board,1492525347531 currently holds even more water than the reservoirs -- about 29 million acre-feet.1492528235854

That's all great, and it means that the drought that has been tormenting the state since the winter of 2011-2012 is definitively over. But this is California, where precipitation varies so wildly from winter to winter that the state is never more than a year or two from a water shortage. The state's cities, farms and factories together use from 30 million to 40 million acre-feet of water a year. Total reservoir capacity is about 45 million acre-feet, but that includes more than a thousand smaller reservoirs, many of which aren't connected to the state's major water-supply networks. And while that "reservoir" of snow is impressive this spring, it will be almost all gone by fall.