Snow blankets Kings Beach, Calif., on Feb. 18, 2026.

As rain pelted the Sierra Nevada over the last couple days, it percolated into the dry layer of snow blanketing the landscape and froze into ice. Over that short time period, the rain has notably increased the amount of water in the snowpack.

Experts welcomed the change, reporting that one essential metric, the median “snow water equivalent” or SWE, had jumped up by 5% since Monday.

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“SWE is the most important metric for all of our water resources,” Andrew Schwartz, the director of UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, wrote in an email to SFGATE. “... It’s the metric that we deal with the most and the one that the entirety of the snow research and operations community is working to get right. So, seeing an increase in SWE like that, even if it’s from........

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