You are now in California and the U.S. category.

As the days darken, all eyes are on the Sierra Nevada, then the sky, with a glance back at the mountains, to the Internet for forecast information, over to the thermometer — all in a fidgety search for a sign, any sign, that this winter will be wet. It is an increasingly desperate and often futile exercise that farmers, skiers, water officials, meteorologists and residents tired of water rationing slog through each fall in an attempt to decrypt the capricious California climate.

It’s about taking water and not about fish. South San Joaquin Irrigation District General Manager Peter Rietkerk made it clear that is the district’s view of the State Water Board move to mandate unimpaired flows of 40 percent on the Stanislaus, Merced, and Tuolumne rivers between February and June. Rietkerk spoke before the Ripon Rotary Club at its Wednesday noon meeting at Spring Creek Country Club.

The drought is not going away. Adam Nagourney, the Los Angeles bureau chief, traveled to a Central Valley farming community that became a national symbol of the drought. He wrote on Wednesday about a setback in Californians’ efforts to conserve water that has some experts worried. While the situation has improved since last year, meteorologists say we are a long way from replenishing our groundwater supplies and reservoirs. And the drought shows no sign of ending.What does this all mean for Californians?

Two growing seasons after the engineered spring flood of the Colorado River Delta in 2014, the delta’s birds, plants and groundwater continue to benefit, according to the latest monitoring report prepared for the International Boundary and Water Commission by a binational University of Arizona-led team. “This short-term event has had lasting consequences. This really demonstrates that a little bit of water does a lot of environmental good,” said Karl W. Flessa, UA professor of geosciences and co-chief scientist of the Minute 319 monitoring team.

Federal forecasters predict this winter may paint the U.S. in stripes of different weather: Warmer and drier than normal in the south, and colder and wetter than usual in the far north. The National Weather Service winter outlook , issued Thursday, gets murky in the nation’s middle belt, with no particular expectation for trends in temperature or precipitation. Still, some nasty storms might make the winter there memorable, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center.