Ů��С��Ƶ

Just a week after Governor Jerry Brown declared the end of the California drought emergency, the northern half of the state logged its wettest year into the record books. But that doesn’t mean California’s water problems are over.

On 13 April, rainfall measuring stations in the Sierra Nevada mountains recorded 89.7 inches of water. The previous record set in 1983 was 88.5 inches.

In the past 12 months, California has simultaneously dealt with the effects of not enough water and far too much of it. After the five driest years on record, which required Californians to limit water use, the state has been deluged by storms that overflowed dams and helped the snowpack in the Sierras rebound from unprecedented lows.

“While extreme weather by itself is not unusual, this is more extreme than anything in the historical record,” says , a hydroclimatologist at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.

Superbloom

Even though some water restrictions remain in place in California, the greening landscape may make it easy to slip into a false sense of security. The reprieve from drought has kicked off a superbloom across California, a widespread wildflower burst that is transforming brown desert hills into brightly colored fields.

“One of California’s challenges has always been remembering the dry periods when the rains return. We’re quick to forget how bad it can get,” Gleick says.

California’s drought persists in 4 counties where 10 million people live, many of whom rely on groundwater wells that have dried up.

“If there’s a perception that because we’ve had a wet winter, that means everyone that felt the effect of this drought is now out of the woods, that’s simply not accurate,” says of Stanford University.

The drought led to the death of 100 million trees and soil compaction that reduced storage space in aquifers. And communities in Central California are still relying on emergency drinking water.

“This drought has been severe and it’s been pervasive, but it’s also highlighted real inequities,” Diffenbaugh says. “For many residents of California, this drought has been about access to reliable clean water, rather than what kind of landscaping is appropriate for outside of one’s home. Those issues are not going to go away with one wet winter.”