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The El Niño storms drenching California won’t suffice to solve the state’s drought and won’t permanently save the Central Valley’s vulnerable salmon, federal scientists are cautioning.

In an apolitical assessment that comes amid a highly political time, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts stress that this year’s El Niño bounty is both useful and limited. It might well be followed, moreover, by a swing back to a different kind of weather complication called La Niña.

How wet will it be? Baruffaldi said the North State can expect as much as 5 1/2 inches of rain through Tuesday. The first of the rain should arrive Thursday morning and then ease off a bit Friday. Another storm is expected to arrive Saturday night. And more is forecast to follow that one through Tuesday.

The series of storms is being drawn up from out in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii, said David Houck, a meteorologist with Accuweather.

Been pretty wet the last few days. Streams are full, rivers are full. Without doubt, come summer, we’ll wish we had saved more of what is just running out to sea now, but apparently we’re not smart enough as a state to do that.

The solution has been known for years: You build Sites Reservoir west of Maxwell, and divert some of that extra water there. There’s plenty of rain water available from the roughly 10,000 square-miles of untapped Sacramento River watershed between Oroville Dam and Shasta Dam, but there’s just no way to save it now.

Sacramento dries out for at least 24 hours before the parade of storms begins again to drench the north state later in the week. Residents should have a rainless Tuesday to pick up branches scattered by the weekend’s high winds and clear roof gutters choked with leaves and rain water. The numbers tell the story of a wet start to March in Sacramento.

The series of storms that marched into the city are much like what used to visit Sacramento before drought. The storms extended over several days.

The powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California agreed Tuesday to buy four islands and a portion of a fifth in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a bid that some conservationists believe is a blatant water grab by California’s largest water agency.

The district’s 37-member board of directors, representing 26 agencies in Southern California, authorized Metropolitan’s general manager to enter into a purchase agreement to buy 20,369 acres of land encompassing Webb Tract, Bacon Island, Bouldin Island, most of Holland Tract and a portion of Chipps Island, in Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Solano counties.