January’s heavy rains are erasing years of extreme drought in many areas of California, when it comes to the state’s surface supplies of water. The same can’t be said yet for the state’s groundwater basins. More than 30 counties in northern California are now considered to be drought-free according to the latest survey by the U.S. Drought Monitor. The southern half of the state still has a ways to go, but in all cases, the status is much improved over even just last week.

After five years of drought, California is in the midst of one of the wettest years on record. The Sacramento River is swollen, the Yolo Bypass looks like a lake, Sierra snowpack is accumulating and large reservoirs are filling. And as inevitably happens when rain falls, local water agencies, San Diego’s among them, are calling on the state to lift restrictions on water use. But the rainy season doesn’t end until April. Whether it keeps raining or not, April would be soon enough to make a declaration one way or another.

Hammered with record rainstorms and blizzards, nearly half of California is no longer in a drought, and the rest saw dramatic improvement over the past week, federal scientists reported Thursday. Overall, 49 percent of the state is now drought free, the highest level since April 2013, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.