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Pounding rains, heavy snow: It’s shaping up as another wintry week in Northern California. A significant storm poured into the region Tuesday, the first stage of an extended wet period that’s expected to continue through Friday and possibly into the weekend. “It’s a pretty good, wet five or six days or so,” said Mike Kochasic of the National Weather Service in Sacramento. After brief overnight drizzles, the rains started falling in earnest early Tuesday. Temperatures were warm at first, and motorists heading over the Sierra Nevada found themselves dealing with raindrops instead of snow.

With long-term drought conditions well on their way back into California, an incoming period of wet, stormy weather will be welcome by many. A recent bout of heavy rain brought as much as one-third to 100 percent of the month’s normal precipitation to several cities, including Santa Barbara, San Diego and Los Angeles. In addition to the heavy high-elevation snowfall of recent weeks, it may seem like the area is well on its way out of the drought – however, it will take many rounds of similarly wet days to bring the water supply back to necessary levels.

Not if, but when. That’s the future of water desalination plants in Arizona, according to the head of the state’s water department. They are controversial and expensive, but Arizona’s current leadership views desalinated water – or “desal” – as key to the state’s long-term water plans. Arizona sits atop an estimated 600 million acre-feet of brackish water.