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California is not the only place in the West confronting startling amounts of rain and snow. Drought conditions have declined substantially across the region in recent weeks, with heavy storms replenishing reservoirs and piling fresh powder on ski resorts. Yet there is one place where the precipitation has been particularly welcome and could be transformative: the Colorado River basin, which provides water to nearly 40 million people across seven states.

Snowpack and reservoir levels continued to increase in California, marking another week of improvement for drought conditions across the state. Last week, 47 percent of the state was in drought, but that figure plummeted to 24 percent this week, according to the Drought Monitor report issued Thursday. At this time last year, 94 percent of California was in drought.

 

Jeffrey Mount, a leading expert on California water policy, remembers the last time a crisis at the Oroville Dam seemed likely to prompt reform. It was 1997 and the lake risked overflowing, while levees further downstream failed and several people died. “If this doesn’t galvanize action, I don’t know what will,” Mount said he thought at the time. But spring came, the waters receded and no changes came to pass.

 

A pacific storm that drew energy from the subtropics unleashed ferocious winds and intense rain across San Diego County on Friday, causing fatal accidents, power outages affecting thousands of residents and damage to homes when uprooted trees fell on them. The precipitation was part of a broad, fast-moving system that generated even wilder winds and heavier rainfall across other parts of Southern California, including a 72 mph gust in the Long Beach Harbor area.

Climate change did not produce California’s winter flooding that abruptly ended a devastating drought. That weather swing is just how California works. California has endured rotating cycles of wet and dry periods throughout its history. If there are weeks of deluge, a severe drought is on the way. It happens every decade or so. But climate change will bring more frequent and robust cycles of extreme weather. Bet on it. “All of our climate change calculations suggest wetter wets and drier dries,” says Jeffrey Mount, a water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.