California’s wet again, the snowpack looks good and ski resorts are happy. Will it last?

Just a few weeks ago, it was one of the driest starts to the rainy season in modern California history. PG&E was shutting off power to tens of thousands of Californians as dangerously dry fire weather dragged on nearly to Thanksgiving.

Now, after a handful of storms, the Sierra has a healthy coating of snow, and the Central Valley’s rainfall totals are about at their historic average.

“The fall started dry, and we started to wonder,” said Maury Roos, senior hydrologist at the California Department of Water Resources. “But certainly we’ve had some storms now, and it seems like we’re pretty close to normal for this time of the season.”

The shift from painfully dry to abundantly wet is yet another example of California’s boom-and-bust weather patterns, proving yet again why experts say it’s notoriously difficult to make long-range predictions about a winter of drought or deluge.

The massive coastal storms known as atmospheric rivers can pull the state out of drought conditions in a matter of days, straining the state’s network of levees and dams. But those same storms, which tend to hit between December and March, are notoriously fickle. Atmospheric rivers were rare during California’s six-year historic drought, which ended officially in 2017.

“I’m not so worried about drought at this moment, but this is California. It could change over the course of a couple of months,” said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. “It could stop raining today, and we could have three dry months. Then we’d start to worry.”

After one of the driest-ever starts to the official rainy season that began October 1, more than 4.5 inches of rain has fallen at Sacramento Executive Airport, putting the region at about 89 percent of normal for this point in the year, according to the National Weather Service.

That’s the most rain at this point in the year since 2016, state data show.

In other good water news, California’s primary reservoirs such as Shasta, Trinity and Oroville are almost all at or above-average levels. The rain and snowmelt captured behind their dams are a critical source of irrigation and drinking water for the state during its dry summers and falls.

Meanwhile, another key source of water for the state, the Sierra snowpack, also is looking up after the dry start of the fall. The Sierra snowpack stood at 105 percent of normal on Monday, according to snow sensors maintained by the Department of Water Resources.

That’s the first time since 2015 that the snowpack has been above normal at this point in the year. The snowpack has been below normal on this date in seven of the previous 10 years.

Ski resorts are thrilled. All of them are open.

Some, such as Mammoth Mountain in the Central Sierra, have already received more than 10 feet of snow, right in time for the busy holiday season, said Mike Reitzell, the president of Ski California, the state’s ski resort industry trade association.

“Once it started snowing, it really got everybody up and down the state,” Reitzell said. “Mother Nature did not discriminate early season.”

He said so much snow fell that it’s likely the resorts could withstand several weeks of dry conditions and still keep the slopes open. That buffer could prove helpful to the resorts if federal forecasters’ warnings proved prescient that long-term modeling showed drought is likely across parts of California through February.

But Reitzell said the resorts, like anyone else who depends on fickle California precipitation, is well aware of that possibility.

“I think we live every year on hope,” Reitzell said. “We certainly have no idea what the rest of the winter is going to bring, but we’re off to a very promising start.”

This story was originally published December 23, 2019 at 12:40 PM.