Lake Oroville is seen down a Bidwell Canyon Marina boat ramp Wednesday. The lake has come up almost 28 feet since Jan. 1, triggering a Facebook swarm Wednesday, but it obviously still has a long way to go. Bill Husa — Mercury-Register

The lake was a trending item on many users’ news feeds for quite a while Wednesday. Although trending items vary based on a user’s preferences, including location, staffers from this publication saw Lake Oroville topping the racism flap over the Oscar nominations, Netflix’s new shows and Planet Nine.

Farmers in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley are bracing to receive no irrigation water from a federal system of reservoirs and canals for a third consecutive year and looking to El Niño to produce the very wet winter they need.

The year kicked off with heavy rains and an above-average snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. The El Niño — a global weather system associated with wet winters in California — may play out nationwide through late spring or beyond, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say.

A farmer on Tuesday spread canal water across an almond orchard southwest of Modesto. He wasn’t irrigating the trees – the rain took care of that. He was recharging groundwater.

The almond industry and its partners are researching whether excess water in wet years such as this one could boost aquifers that might be stressed during drought. In Tuesday’s demonstration for the media, the water came from city storm drains via a Modesto Irrigation District canal that usually is idle in winter.

The California State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board) issued its first temporary groundwater storage permit to the Scott Valley Irrigation District to capture high winter and spring flows for local groundwater storage and recharge. The permit is the first in what is expected to be a series of temporary permits issued for this type of water diversion and use.

The temporary permit application was submitted Jan. 13 by the District in coordination with staff at the University of California at Davis, the California Farm Bureau Federation, Scott River Water Trust and others.

After four years of a crushing drought, Californians are hoping El Niño storms bring relief this winter.

But whether they replenish the state’s reservoirs and rebuild its crucial snowpack remains to be seen, with many experts cautioning that the state’s water deficit is too severe to be resolved in one rainy year.

So 2016 promises to be another critical year in California water policy centering on politically charged discussions of whether Gov. Jerry Brown (D) will extend urban conservation mandates and succeed in dramatically reshaping Northern California’s water infrastructure with the construction of two 30-mile-long tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta.