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Winter made an early appearance Tuesday morning when snow fell on Sonora Pass and the craggy, highest heights of east Tuolumne County.Michael Todd Jones of Sonora was driving to work in the Bishop area, heading east up Highway 108 to the top of the 9,624-foot pass, the second-highest paved route over the Sierra Nevada range. With snowflakes coming down, dusting the ground and clinging to trees in the 6 a.m. hour, Jones used his iPhone 6 to snap a couple photos and texted them to his wife, Allison Jones, who was 65 miles west, down the hill in Sonora.

When it comes to water management in California, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is a giant. The 26 public agencies belonging to the district together deliver water to 19 million people, making it the largest distributor of drinking water in the country. About half of it is imported, part from the Colorado River system and part from the State Water Project. What does it take to run an organization that delivers 1.5 billion gallons (5.7bn liters) of water per day? And what impact has the drought had on planning?

America’s No. 1 agricultural state, California, did not fare any better than the rest of nation last year with a drop of $9 billion in cash receipts, a 17 percent plunge from the previous year. The drop was not unexpected for Vernon Crowder, senior vice president of Rabobank in Fresno, Calif. However, the size did surprise him. The drought had plenty to do with the nose dive, but significant drops in dairy and nut prices also contributed. Unlike Midwest corn and soybeans, the prospects for a California turnaround are good.

In the coming days and weeks, some of the implications of climate change and the need to improve California’s aging water delivery system will become more evident to all parts of the state, none too soon. Old lines in California’s unending water wars could start to shift, as Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration makes clear that the holders of senior water rights, which date to the turn of the last century and before, are not immune to the demands of the environment and the realities of diminishing supplies of what they claim as their water.

As the Western United States struggles with chronic water shortages and a changing climate, scientists are warning that if vast underground stores of fresh water that California and other states rely on are not carefully conserved, they too may soon run dry. Heeding this warning, California passed new laws in late 2014 that for the first time require the state to account for its groundwater resources and measure how much water is being used.