Storm boosts rain and snow totals, but not enough

Recent storms have dropped more than an inch of rain on San Francisco and blanketed the Sierra with snow, but water levels and snowpack around the state are still lagging far below normal.

“It was a few drops in the bucket at least,” Scott Rowe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey, said Saturday.

In San Francisco, slightly more than 1.2 inches of rain have fallen since Wednesday, with almost 1.4 inches at San Francisco International Airport. Numbers were similar in the East Bay and South Bay: Oakland got 1.13 inches and San Jose Airport just over an inch. The North Bay fared better, with Santa Rosa recording a little more than 2 inches of rain and Napa getting almost 1.8 inches.

“This was the first significant system since early January,” Rowe said. “Nonetheless, if we talk about the strength of the storm, it wasn’t particularly strong because we didn’t get that much rain, but anything’s welcome.”

Water levels across the state are still facing a deficit, and nearly half of California is now facing moderate drought conditions. Since Oct. 1, downtown San Francisco has gotten 9.93 inches of rain, compared with an average of 18.08.

The storm hit harder in the Sierra, where the entire region was blanketed with between 3 feet and 8 feet of snow since Wednesday.

The Lake Tahoe area saw between 2 and 6 feet of snow, said Dawn Johnson of the National Weather Service in Reno. Near Mammoth to the south and on peaks more than 10,000 feet in elevation, those totals were even higher.

“Obviously it’s been helping the snowpack,” Johnson said. “Right now it’s hard to get an estimate exactly how much.”

Until the recent storms, the sparse snowpack was hovering between 20 and 30 percent of average, approaching record lows. Johnson estimated that the latest storm may have bumped it up to between 40 and 60 percent of average.

And the storm isn’t over for the Sierra.

“There’s a final piece coming through” Saturday night, Johnson said. “It’ll be significantly weaker than what we’ve seen so far, but will add a few inches up in the mountains.”

In the coming week, both the Bay Area and the mountains will again see a chance of rain and snow.

“We begin to reintroduce the chance of precipitation late Wednesday to Thursday, with a 20 to 30 percent chance of rain across the Bay Area,” Rowe said.