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The San Diego County Water Authority has such an oversupply of drinking water that it just dumped half a billion gallons into a lake. The Sierra snowpack is 130 percent of normal, its greatest total in five years. And rainstorms will continue to drench parts of California off and on for months.

But now is not the time to ease up on water conservation efforts, in San Diego or elsewhere.

 

So we applaud this week’s sensible action by the State Water Resources Control Board. The agency extended the state’s emergency conservation mandate through October while easing restrictions on water suppliers to account for regional differences in climate, population growth and new supplies in places such as San Diego County, where a desalination plant just opened in Carlsbad.

Higher-than-normal rainfall associated with El Niño has diminished the risk of wildfires in California for the next four months, according to a national fire agency report.

 

However, those same rains ultimately could trigger an uptick in grass fires at lower elevations because of a heavy grass crop expected in late spring, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. The NICC helps oversee wildfire response efforts.

Most of the water agencies in San Diego County fell short of their state-mandated conservation targets in December, according to data released Tuesday by the state Water Resources Control Board.

 

The lagging savings totals reflected the state as a whole, which cut back by 18.3 percent in December, missing Gov. Jerry Brown’s order to reduce water use by 25 percent statewide.

Southern California got drenched Sunday, with some areas getting up to three inches of rain. It’s an El Niño year. So does that mean Southern California’s rainfall is ahead of normal this year?

Not yet.

As of Monday morning, the region has received 41.1 percent of a normal winter’s precipitation. That’s behind even the median, or typical year, which by February is at 56.3 percent.

 

And if you look at just recent years with strong El Niños, median precipitation is even further ahead by this point: 78.8 percent.

More than 3.7 inches of rain fell on the mountains above Azusa, winds topped 70 miles per hour and the San Fernando Valley escaped the possibility of a”small, brief tornado” as a strong squall line of rain blew through today.

The line of strong storms, moving east, was in a line from Malibu to Burbank during the 1 p.m. hour, forecasters said. It moved east across L.A. County at about 50 miles per hour, with pockets of sun and rain alternating behind it.