Snow blankets mountains near the meadow where the California Department of Water Resources conducts the third media snow survey of the 2026 season at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada, Feb. 27, 2026.

The prolific snowfall that blanketed the Sierra Nevada in February did little to bolster the season’s overall snowpack totals, water resource officials said. 

On Friday, the Department of Water Resources released the results of its third snow survey of the season, conducted at the Phillips Station near South Lake Tahoe. While numbers were up from the previous survey, which recorded dismal lows, the snowpack has a long way to go to catch up to a normal winter. 

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“The manual survey recorded 28 inches of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of 11 inches, which is 47 percent of average for this location,” DWR said in a statement. The snowpack for California as a whole was at 66% of average, the release said. 

“Unfortunately, the recent storms were not enough to get the state back to average conditions for this time of year. Warmer storms early this week also caused snowmelt at lower elevations,” the statement said. 

California Department of Water Resources, from left, engineer Derick Louie and engineer Jordan Thoennes conduct the third media snow survey of the 2026 season at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada County, Feb. 27, 2026.

DWR officials confirmed that while the storms brought precipitation, the window for building up the snowpack is shrinking. “The snowpack is in better shape than it was one month ago, but we only have a month left of our snow-accumulation season and time is rapidly running out to catch up. Statewide, we are only about 57 percent of where we hope to be by April 1,” DWR snow survey and forecasting manager Andy Reising said in the statement. 

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Don't let Google decide who you trust.

“Obviously the season is not over yet and we have [one] more month left of the snowpack-building season,” DWR spokesperson Jason Ince wrote SFGATE via email Monday. “But you can view how we stack up to previous years at this time with this page to see the statewide snowpack based on our network of remote snow sensors.” 

As of Monday, the statewide snowpack was 62% of normal for that date. For context, March 2, 2023, saw 193% of normal for the year to date snowpack statewide, after several months of record-setting rain and snow. March 2, 2024, snowpack totals were 96% of normal, and March 2, 2025, snow totals were 82% of normal. The statewide average hasn’t dipped below 50% for this time of year since March 2, 2020, when the statewide snowpack total was 44% of normal. This year’s current total is very similar to March 2, 2021, and 2022, when the statewide totals were 61% and 63% of normal respectively.

While many California reservoirs are currently at or near capacity, with the winter months now coming to an end, officials warned that drought conditions statewide could come back into play if snow totals remain stagnant. “Water supply in California increasingly depends on a small number of big storms,” DWR Director Karla Nemeth said in the statement. “We face higher drought risk when they don’t arrive and greater urgency to modernize infrastructure to capture water when they do.”

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California Department of Water Resources, from left, hydrometeorologist Angelique Fabbiani-Leon, Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit manager Andy Reising, engineer Derick Louie and engineer Jordan Thoennes conduct the third media snow survey of the 2026 season at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada, Feb. 27, 2026.

Though winter isn’t quite over yet, there currently isn’t anything that looks like a miracle March over the next two weeks. “Clouds and sun with scattered showers through Monday. A break on Tuesday, and then scattered showers are possible again on Wednesday,” Bryan Allegretto, a Tahoe forecaster for OpenSnow, wrote in a recent post. 

“We could see a mainly dry pattern from the 5th through at least the 15th of March,” he continued. 

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“The dramatic wet-dry swings this winter remind us again that ever-warmer average temperatures have reshaped the California water cycle,” Nemeth said in the statement. “We must adapt.”

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