Sprinkling of rain could be Bay Area’s last of season

The time to put away the umbrella may have arrived.

After a seven-month stretch that set rainfall records in some parts of Northern California, what could be the last rainfall of the season will brush the Bay Area on Wednesday.

It will probably be limited to the North Bay, and even there, it doesn’t look to be heavy, said Bob Benjamin, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.

“It’s going to be extremely light — maybe a tenth of an inch in northern Sonoma County,” Benjamin said.

After that, chances are it’s warmer and dry until October or so.

“I don’t see anything on the horizon,” Benjamin said. “It probably will be (the last storm of the season) — we’re getting into May.”

And by the time we get to May, Benjamin noted, “we’re pretty much done.”

The rain year has been good to California. At this time last year, three-fourths of the state was in “severe drought,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. That total is now

just 1 percent, and Gov. Jerry Brown declared an end to the state’s drought emergency in all but a handful of counties this month.

The evidence of California’s swing from drought is visible from miles in the air — in the cases of rising reservoir levels and the explosion of wildflowers, signs are even visible from space.

This year’s snowpack in the Sierra, the water bank that feeds reservoirs into the summer, is greater than in the past four years combined, NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory said last week. In the northern Sierra, this has been the wettest year ever in records that go back to 1921.

Not all the drought’s damage has been repaired. The recent rainfall has done little to improve the state’s groundwater supply, which can take years or even decades to recover after a drought, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Filipa Ioannou is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: fioannou@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @obioannoukenobi