Don’t be fooled by this week’s Sierra snow. Here’s the water reality in Northern California
The latest flurries that dusted parts of the Sierra Nevada this week are unlikely to do much to ease California’s snow drought.
Since April 1 — when the state measured its second-lowest snowpack on record — the Sierra Nevada has seen a few rounds of storms. This week’s system triggered winter storm warnings in the range and brought up to two feet of snow at the peaks. The powdery scene may have made some feel like winter was back.
It isn’t. And neither is the snowpack.
“It’s when you look at the big picture of it all. It’s not going to do enough to get you back to a normal snowpack year,” said Chad Hecht, a meteorologist with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Since we are in April and approaching May, it will not last too long up in the higher elevations. It’ll continue to melt off.”
The Sierra snowpack started off with some decent rounds of storms going into the winter, between late December and early January, and during a mid-February cold storm that boosted accumulations. But any optimism quickly faded when a warm storm hit the mountains in late February, followed by record-setting heat in March that melted most of the already below average snow levels.
On April 1, when the annual snowpack is typically at its peak, it stood at just 18% of average. It briefly climbed to 23% on April 21, but has since melted away, falling back to 18% as of Tuesday.
While it’s difficult to link climate change directly to a single extreme weather event, a thinning snowpack, faster onset of spring, and more frequent and intense heatwaves are a climate-driven pattern that falls within the effects of a changing climate. In California, some of those extreme events include the worst drought seasons on record in 2021 and 2022, followed by dramatic weather whiplash that led to widespread flooding in 2023, and an ongoing pattern of unpredictable and declining Sierra snowpacks.
Water levels at key reservoirs remain above average, with Shasta Lake at 109% of average, Oroville at 123%, New Bullards Bar at 115%, and Folsom at 131%. But there’s a limit to how much these reservoirs can hold, as they must release excess water downstream into rivers and cannot store it for future use.
Snowpack is an essential lifeline for the state’s water supply that keeps reservoirs healthy, acting as a slow, natural release system that melts gradually through drier periods and trickles water down into reservoirs. As it stands, that buffer simply won’t exist this year.
“We are in what we like to call a shoulder season, where we start to transition into the dry season for California,” Hecht said. In a normal year, a healthier snowpack would last longer into the summer, but by mid-summer, he added, “we’ll probably have zero snow throughout the Sierra, whatsoever.”
This story was originally published April 22, 2026 at 9:11 AM.
