You are now in California and the U.S. category.

At one point, the U.S. Drought Monitor map showed the presence of “exceptional drought”, the worst category designated by researchers, across much of California and a large portion of the areas of northern Texas and Oklahoma. A look at the map today shows neither of those areas has a drought problem at all. “Exceptional drought” has become a rarity across the country. The current U.S. Drought Monitor map shows relatively small areas of “exceptional drought” in a part of North Dakota and a tiny sliver of northeast Montana.

The engineers who scrambled to prevent Delta farms from flooding this year have long insisted that the levees surrounding those low-lying islands are not as fragile as they’re sometimes portrayed to be. Now, after seven months of high water without a single major island flooding, those engineers feel validated. “We hear so many bad things about the levees,” said engineer Gilbert Cosio, who works for a number of the rural reclamation districts run by farmers. “But we’ve been doing a lot of good the last 30 years. This kind of proves it. This was not the disaster it could have been.”

Even after a decade of studies and tens of thousands of pages of analysis, no one can say precisely what Gov. Jerry Brown’s twin tunnels will do to the Delta. Pushing forward with the $17 billion project despite the uncertainty, backers are promising to evaluate the impacts of the tunnels after they’re built, and potentially change how they are operated as new information comes to light.

The Colorado River flows 1,500 miles (2,400km) – through rises and rapids, valleys and deserts, all the way to Mexico. But this river of critical importance to our country is facing incredible challenges. The Colorado River provides water to almost 40 million Americans, but it is still reeling from the impacts of a 17-year drought that has drained most of Lake Mead and left Arizona and Nevada on the brink of imposed shortages. The struggle we face to protect the Colorado River basin is one of necessity, not choice.