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A drop-off in Californians’ water conservation efforts seems to have leveled off, state officials said Tuesday, though residents still used more water during the month of September than they did the same month in 2015. The news comes one month after the State Water Resources Control Board expressed concern that savings were slipping. Earlier, the board had decided to relax the rules and allow cities to set their own numeric targets; most decided that none were needed. So when conservation starting slumping, critics said the board wasn’t taking aggressive enough action.

After undergoing emergency surgery to remove life-threatening masses, Gov. Jerry Brown’s beloved corgi has again been called into service.

Sutter, having recently returned home following the cancer diagnosis, was at Brown’s side when he campaigned for a 2012 sales and income tax hike, Proposition 30. At the Capitol, amid tense budget negotiations, the pooch appeared on playing cards urging over-exuberant legislators to exercise some fiscal restraint, dispensing such wisdom as “bark if you hate deficits!” and “always keep a bone buried in the back yard.”

Rainfall totals in October in the Sacramento area have reached 4 and one-third inches, a whopping 493 percent above normal. But that doesn’t mean California’s five year drought is over. “One good wet month does not a drought buster make,” said Doug Carlson, spokesperson for the Department of Water Resources.

Although in the past a wet October is followed by a wet winter, long-range forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aren’t betting on it. All that rain isn’t affecting California reservoirs much since the ground is so dry that it is absorbing most of the rain.

The western United States set records for low winter snowpack levels in 2015, and a new report blames high temperatures rather than low precipitation levels, according to a new study.

Greenhouse gases appear to be a major contributor to the high temperatures, according to the study published Monday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Scientists looked at snow-measurement sites in California, Oregon, Washington, western Nevada and western Idaho. They found that in 2015, more than 80 percent of those sites experienced record low snowpack levels as a result of much warmer-than-average temperatures.

The blob is back. Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather. Earlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior. The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem.