This year is one of the driest and hottest in California in records dating back to 1895.

The entire state is now in a drought emergency, farmers are being paid not to grow crops, reservoirs are going dry, salmon are dying and intense drought-fueled wildfires are destroying homes and land and lives in their path.

So what happens if relief doesn't materialize during the upcoming wet season?

“If we have another dry winter, things are going to start to get real hairy in some sectors,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who studies drought, wildfires and other weather events, told weather.com in a recent interview.

Some small towns and farmers might not have water, and there's already talk of mandatory restrictions on its use. Electricity generation from hydropower is expected to drop. More wildlife is likely to die. Wildfire season could get even more intense.

And those are just a few of the worst impacts.

(MORE: Why California Wildfires Are Particularly Destructive in Fall)

Nearly every inch of the western U.S. is in some form of ongoing drought conditions, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report issued Tuesday. But few areas are in as widespread dire straits as California, where more than 87% of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought status, the two highest categories designated by the drought monitor.

Drought is a way of life for the state's more than 37 million residents thanks to California's Mediterranean climate, which is unique in the United States.

But this drought, in its second year, is historic in its extremes. The 12-month period that ended on Sept. 30 - known as the water year - was the driest in California in nearly a century and the second driest ever recorded, according to a report from the California Department of Water Resources and other agencies.

Going back further, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information says the 18-month period from April 2020 to Sept. 30 was the driest on record in California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday expanded a state of emergency already in place in some areas to all of California.

A news release from the governor's office said the drought is the worst since the late 1800s, as measured by both the lack of precipitation and high temperatures.

Swain and other experts say the drought is made worse by warmer temperatures brought on by human-induced climate change.

And while a wetter pattern will bring periods of rain and mountain snow through early next week to the drought-stricken West, including California, it's far too early to tell how the wet season, which runs from now until about May and includes rain and snow, will pan out overall.

(MORE: Parched and In Peril, Weather Extremes Forever Changing California)

One of the factors that will come into play is La Niña over the Pacific this winter. Typically, that means the northern U.S. gets more precipitation than usual, while the southern U.S. sees less than usual.

“To the extent that that tells us anything about the coming winter it probably does tell us that there’s an increased likelihood of a dry winter, at least in the southern two-thirds of California … which is really not what we want to see right now," Swain said.

A September NOAA Drought Task Force report predicts drought conditions will continue in some areas well into 2022, if not longer.

Jeanine Jones, drought manager for the California Department of Water Resources, said the state is planning accordingly.

“For practical purposes when we have conditions as dry as they have been these two past years we have to assume that those conditions may continue because certainly, California is no stranger to multiyear droughts,” Jones told weather.com. “So we are actually preparing for the prospects of a third significantly dry year."

That means tempering expectations of allocations from the State Water Project, California's 705-mile long system of canals, pipelines, reservoirs, and hydroelectric power facilities that supply water to about 68% of California's population as well as hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.

Contracted water distributors request allocations from the project each year. In the 2020-21 water year, they got about 5% of what they asked for, Jones said. Jones said allocations for this water year could be even lower, and state officials have warned of possible mandatory restrictions on water use.

There are other similar water projects in California, and the systems aren't the only place to get water. Large metropolitan areas, in particular, have several water sources to draw from.

“Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are not going to run out of water any time soon, even with another dry winter,” Swain said. “But many small water districts in the North Coast, Central Valley, and in some portions of Northern California interior, could start to get pretty close to running out of water next year if we do have another winter with low precipitation.”

Jones said many of the smaller communities don't have the same resources as big cities, and are struggling not just with drought but also with aging infrastructure and other issues.

The state's surface water supply was at about 60% of average going into the new water year that started Oct. 1, Jones said.

A "normal" water year won't be enough to make up for the shortages.

But there are other even potentially larger concerns in this persistent, extreme drought.

“It doesn’t really matter how much water is in the reservoir if you’re a tree in the forest or a fish in the river that doesn’t have any water anymore,” Swain said. “These are consequences that aren’t really mitigated by the urban water supply resilience that we do see in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles. And that’s important because there are a lot of ecosystems in California that are profoundly struggling right now."

Nearly all of the giant sequoia trees known to exist in California were in areas experiencing exceptional drought conditions as of June, according to advocacy group Save the Redwoods. Assessments are ongoing to determine how many burned in wildfires since, but some reports say it could be in the hundreds.

Eighty percent of the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River could die this year, according to the drought monitor. In southern California's Anza Borrego Desert State Park, millions of gallons of water were airlifted by helicopter to keep endangered bighorn sheep and other desert wildlife alive.

Damage to ecosystems will get much worse if it continues to stay this dry, Jay Lund, an engineering professor and drought expert at the UC-Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, told weather.com.

"I think that challenge is much greater and the effects are much more dire," Lund said.

The power grid, also already under stress in California, is another drought victim. In the San Francisco Bay area, dust and dirt from the dry conditions accumulated on power lines and transformers which caused power outages during recent light rains, according to the drought monitor.

The state has four temporary power generators deployed to two sites in Northern California as part of a plan to gird against power outages caused by drought, wildfires and extreme heatwaves.

And due to low water levels, hydroelectricity production has been cut in California. Nationwide, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that electricity generation from hydropower plants will be 14% lower by the end of this year due to drought conditions.

The dryness in California isn't just caused by a lack of precipitation. Warming temperatures mean that more water evaporates from reservoirs and other sources, Lund said.

"Temperatures have been high unusually high, by historical standards, for the last decade or so," Lund said. "So in this drought and the previous drought we’ve had much higher evaporation from the watersheds and from the reservoirs than we have had historically so in terms of runoffs these droughts are even drier than they are in terms of precipitation.”

California this year saw its warmest spring and summer average temperatures on record.

Those warmer temperatures, which scientists say are induced by greenhouse gas emissions, also fuel aridification, which is the process of drying out land, vegetation and other parts of the landscape.

"When you have a drought the idea is that, eventually, the drought will end … In a warming climate though there are some regions that by virtue of the fact that it’s consistently getting warmer and it isn’t going to get cooler on, really, human time scales over the next decades to centuries, the drying that’s occurring is long term," Swain said, adding this is especially true in parts of the interior Southwest.

That is especially bad news for wildfires, which have burned in historic proportions this year and last.

“The drier things get the more intensely they burn and the more intensely they burn the more extreme fires that you see," Swain said.

Many factors influence wildfires, but when they burn more intensely they create more smoke, a major public health hazard. Smoke from western wildfires this summer floated all the way to New York.

“It’s not the presence of fire on the landscape really that’s the problem,” Swain said. “That’s a natural process. The problem is the magnitude and the intensity of the fires that we’re currently seeing. And it is specifically that aspect of wildfire that is directly influenced by climate change and by warming temperatures through that aridification of the landscape and the drying out of vegetation which is potential wildfire fuel.”

Lund pointed out dry, dead trees can fuel fires long after drought has disappeared. The last drought killed more than 100 million trees throughout the forests of California, he said.

“For several years after that we had much greater and worse wildfires because of those dead trees in the forest. The total impact of the drought during the drought economically was on the order of about $9 billion. After the drought ended, in terms of a very wet year, we had tremendous wildfires that were made worse by the drought that cost tens of billions of dollars," Lund said.

“These droughts can be more complicated than we normally think. Quite often some of the biggest impacts occur after the drought has nominally ended.”

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