The Trump administration, teeing up a fight with California regulators, is trying to pump more water through the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the southern half of the state despite fresh evidence of the estuary’s shrinking fish population. A proposal by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to “maximize water deliveries” represents the administration’s first concrete effort to make good on a promise Donald Trump made while campaigning for the presidency in Fresno, where he vowed to deliver more water to San Joaquin Valley farmers and derided protections for endangered fish species.

Californians thirsting for relief from a parched, nearly rainless start to the state’s wet season are finally getting some relief this week. The single meteorological factor contributing to one of the driest final three months of the year on record in California has been a stubborn area of high pressure aloft. Nicknamed the “ridiculously resilient ridge” during the heart of the state’s exceptional drought earlier in the decade, this atmospheric roadblock has steered the Pacific storm track well north of California much of the fall and early winter so far.

When the chief of California’s snow measurements conducts his manual surveys, he usually does it in style, skimming the snow in cross-country skis as reporters plod behind him in snowshoes. No need this time. The vast meadow around Phillips, a remote spot near Echo Summit, was mostly grass and dirt Wednesday, with pitifully small patches of snow. Frank Gehrke, the Department of Water Resources employee who runs the survey, wore simple winter boots as he walked the 200-yard course off Highway 50 to complete the first official snow survey of the season.

The giddiness California water resources officials felt last winter as storms dropped record amounts of rain and snow has faded under a relentless barrage of blue sky and sun, but this week’s promise of stormy weather is giving them hope. Snow surveyors measured only 3 inches of water in the Sierra snowpack Wednesday, a dismal 24 percent of average for this time of year.

Until California’s latest drought really took hold in around 2012, few residents of the Golden State had ever heard of the State Water Resources Control Board. But it very quickly became a major force in their lives. As the five-year drought worsened, the board would go on to order water use limits on every water agency in the state, which led to rationing requirements in households across California. It also imposed severe water-right curtailments, requiring rural residents who draw water from streams to immediately stop doing so.