Just How Wet Has California’s Rainy Season Been?

On Sunday, California’s rainy season officially comes to an end.

As a feature of its Mediterranean-type climate, California receives the vast majority of its annual precipitation between Nov. 1 and March 31. So by the time we’re entering April, we typically know how much water we’ll have to carry us through the rest of the year.

So how did this wet season stack up?

As of Tuesday, California had received slightly more rain than usual this winter — 104 percent of the average, according to state data. The state’s snowpack, which accumulates in the Sierra Nevada and typically provides 30 percent of the state’s water supply for the year, is at 101 percent of normal for this time of year.

The state’s reservoirs are at an even higher 116 percent of their normal levels, in part because they are still benefiting from the back-to-back “atmospheric rivers” that slammed California last winter.

“We’ve got a year, a second year in fact, when most of California was much wetter than average,” the U.C.L.A. climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a recent online briefing. He said the current snowpack levels, while hovering around average, were remarkable, given that we’re “in an era where ‘average’ is not too accurate a descriptor of what happens most of the time.”

This winter wasn’t as wet as the last one, when the snowpack reached a historic high. And it has been warmer than last year and will probably continue to be, Swain said, so the snowpack will most likely melt more quickly than it did in 2023. But two consecutive wet years are still good news for abating any lingering drought conditions in California and for diminishing fire season.

Whether this winter was weirdly wet for you depends on where you live.

Los Angeles, which endured one of its wettest storm systems on record in February, had received 140 percent of its annual average rainfall as of Tuesday. Sacramento, by contrast, has gotten around 95 percent of its average.