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The drought has been declared over in most of California, with heavy winter rains sending water over the Oroville dam and forcing the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people. But climate change is still in the air, and the recent weather pattern is a harbinger of what’s to come. The abrupt shift to record rainfall is the kind of extreme weather forecast for a warming planet. “Current models suggest the dice are loaded toward an increased probability of this kind of year,” said Columbia University climate scientist A. Park Williams.

Over the last 18 months, California has experienced one of the driest, wettest and wildest rides in its recorded water history. As the 2015-16 water year opened in October 2015, drought had driven the state’s reservoir and groundwater levels to all-time lows. Entire towns were left without water. Reports of lakes turned to puddles, of wells running dry by the thousands, and of the cracked ground above depleted aquifers sinking several feet a year dominated state headlines.

The latest Drought Monitor map was made public to begin March and shows a significant improvement in the very dry conditions experienced for months in the west, but a very different story for portions of the southern plains, the southeast and the northeast US.

For three generations, Phillip Filter’s family has tended orchards that grow on a shelf of floodplain above the Feather River. Because the trees stand between the river and a major flood-protection levee, Filter’s family is no stranger to floods that sometimes spill over the river banks, inundate the orchards and then recede back into the channel below. But Filter has never seen damage to the riverbanks like what happened last week after the state suddenly shut down flows from Oroville Dam’s badly damaged spillway upstream.