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What has felt like an especially wet January in California isn’t an effect of people becoming accustomed to the past half decade of drought. It really has been an exceptionally soaking month. San Francisco is experiencing the seventh-wettest January on record to date, according to the National Weather Service, and it’s nipping at the heels of January 1982, when a historic El Niño caused major flooding in California. “The storms have been one after the other,” said Anna Schneider, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Monterey office.

Snow is piling up in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, but this year’s first official water forecast for the Colorado River still predicts Lake Mead will shrink enough to trigger a federal shortage declaration in 2018. Federal forecasters expect the lake’s surface to drop by about 9 feet by the end of 2017, which would put it inches below the all-important shortage line of 1,075 feet above sea level. That would force Nevada and Arizona to cut their use of Colorado River water under rules adopted a decade ago.

Donald Trump made some big campaign promises about water during his election campaign. Now that he has been elected president, those promises could dramatically shake up how water is managed in the arid West. In one of his few direct statements about water, Trump has said he wants to invest in treatment systems to prevent problems caused by aging distribution lines, citing as an example the drinking-water contamination in the Michigan city of Flint. To do this, he proposes to triple funding for a federal loan program, called the state revolving fund, from the current $2 billion to $6 billion.

The California State Water Resources Control Board is being urged to redraft a proposal to double the minimum environmental flows from the Merced, Tuolumne and Stanislaus rivers. Assembly member Adam Gray, D-Merced, has criticized the board for not paying attention to concerns voiced by multiple groups. In a statement, Gray said the proposal “contains so many oversights and error and is so substantially flawed that I cannot possibly do every issue justice in the short time I have today.”

With storms drenching much of California and snow blanketing the Sierra Nevada, the state’s top water regulators are grappling with how to shift from conservation rules devised during more than five years of drought to a long-term strategy for using water more sustainably. The State Water Resources Control Board plans to decide in February whether to extend the current drought regulations, which require local water districts to report on monthly water use and include measures such as prohibiting outdoor watering for 48 hours after rainstorms.