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Weather|With Rain on the Way, California’s Water Managers Are ‘Waiting With Bated Breath’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/weather/california-storm-rain-snow-forecast.html
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Back-to-back storms are expected over the next 10 days, potentially bringing a key measure of the state’s crucial water supply up to normal levels.
Flow of atmospheric water vapor
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration The animation shows data from the GOES-18 satellite, which uses an infrared wavelength that detects water vapor in the upper troposphere, All times on the map are Pacific. By William B. Davis
By Amy Graff
Amy Graff is a San Francisco-based reporter on The Times’s weather team.
March 5, 2025, 5:28 p.m. ET
California is staring down a round of storms that will bring intermittent rain and snow across the state over the next 10 days, and, with the wet season more than two-thirds over, state water managers are watching the forecast closely, hoping these systems will deliver enough precipitation to offset a deficit in some places that have faced dangerously low levels of precipitation this winter.
A storm pushed onshore on Wednesday, and the chance for rain and snow is expected to persist into early Friday. While this system is weak, forecasters were watching it closely in Southern California, where a slight chance of thunderstorms could bring heavy rain to areas of Los Angeles County that recently burned in wildfires partly fueled by how little precipitation had fallen in Southern California in the months before.
The weekend is forecast to be mostly dry before a second storm arrives as early as Sunday and a third, potentially the strongest and wettest, sweeps the state next week.
Five-day precipitation forecast
Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Notes: Values are shown only for the contiguous United States and are in inches of water or the equivalent amount of melted snow and ice. By Zach Levitt, Bea Malsky and Martín González Gómez
California’s annual precipitation, most of which comes during the winter months, is monitored by water managers, farmers, ranchers, Native American tribes, anglers and conservationists. One closely watched metric is the overall snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, a crucial source of water for the state, and it could potentially end the season at normal or above-normal level for the third year in a row if there is a string of monster storms in March. The last time that happened was during the winters of 1998 to 2000, and before that from 1978 to 1980.
When the Sierra snowpack melts in spring, it replenishes reservoirs and underground aquifers through the dry summer, and bolsters the water supply in seasons to come, especially dry ones. The snowpack was 83 percent of its historical average as of Tuesday, with the northern section at 100 percent, the central at 76 and the southern at 75.
