California counts on a system of about 1,400 human-made surface reservoirs and thousands upon thousands of miles of levees to manage surface water.
During the recent storms, extreme drought has buffered some impacts of intense rainfall with plenty of space in the state’s largest reservoirs, which have withered under drought.
Before the series of atmospheric rivers, it was storing less than 1 million acre-feet of water.
In the Central Valley, Californians extract about 2 million acre-feet more than what returns to the ground, on average, every year, Lund said.
California legislators in 2014 passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires local agencies to reach groundwater sustainability by 2042.