Well… some rain is going into some reservoirs. Locally, the reservoirs are at anywhere from 23% to 103% capacity right now. Mostly less than 50%. (I think the “fuller” reservoir numbers might be misleading, as they’ve dropped the capacity of some reservoirs while they work on their seismic stability. We’ve just spent recent decades hoping there wouldn’t be heavy rainfall and an earthquake, as it would have wiped out a good chunk of a major California metropolitan area…) Statewide, it seems some of the smaller reservoirs are at, or a little above, normal levels, but bigger ones are well below where they usually are.
But the state of the reservoirs is only a small part of the picture (more a symptom of drought conditions, really) - there’s also the groundwater levels (which are incredibly low in some parts of the state) which don’t get refilled very much (or at all) by events like this, water sources like the Colorado river whose sources are outside the state (and not necessarily being impacted by this at all), and most importantly the snowpack that keeps waterways full during dry months (and replenishes groundwater). If the atmospheric rivers don’t translate into snowfall in the mountains, they’re not doing much good. (Luckily it looks like they are.)
But the best case scenario here is not that the drought ends, but that various looming water-shortage catastrophes get pushed slightly further into the future.
