I remember being in California three decades ago and hearing the weather announcer say, "We got three inches of rain in the past couple of days, didn't help the drought though.
At that point I decided that one of two things was true, either California was blessed with the dumbest weather announcers in the world or the talk of Drought was a cover for something else.
OK, I will explain. California had a major drought and it doesn't go away just because there is rainfall. Often, when it rains hard, such as three inches of rain, the water often runs off and doesn't get a chance to soak in the soil. It takes a lot of sustained rain to raise the water level. A three inch rain is a drop in the bucket. It is better than nothing, but it will not by itself solve a drought. That is all the weatherman was trying to articulate.
A drought is often solved by sustained rainfall over a year or more that raises the water table, lifts the reservoirs back to normal level. That is when a drought is over. Hydrologists take soil samples and measures the moisture in soil at different depths to determine if a drought is getting better. Just because there is water in a ditch in the front of your yard does not indicate whether a drought is over.