Our rain season runs from October through April and dry season is April to October with typically zero precipitation for those six months. Oftentimes the rainy season gets truncated at one end of the other because of weather patterns. Not this year though. We started normal in October, got completely drenched in December/January with almost 27 inches in 3 weeks and have been steadily getting rain all winter after that. Everything is gorgeously green. We had a couple of dry weeks in the middle of April and then got another couple of inches over the past several days. 76 inches for the rain year, which is about 50% above average. All my county's reservoirs are 100% full. And with as much rain as we got the past few days our fire season will get a late start. Last year we didn't have any fires in our county or anywhere close enough to have smoke to deal with. Keeping my fingers crossed that this year is the same.
I do feel bad for the folks that live in the middle of Tulare Lake in the central valley. It dried out a hundred years ago because all of the water that flowed into it got diverted for agriculture and now people have homes and farms on the lakebed. It flooded once before during a really wet winter (maybe 45 years ago?) and took two years to dry out because ultimately it's still a lake. Once water flows in there's no way for it to flow out. It's expected to take just as long this year because of the expected runoff from the massive snows that happened in the Sierra this winter.