STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Californians hope they're nearing the end of the 5-year drought. A new survey finds the snowpack is higher than normal in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Those snow-covered mountainsides become the source for much of the water that flows down to the coast. Scientist Jay Lund sees this as a good sign.</s>JAY LUND: It's much better than last year, but it's still early days.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: He's director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. And he says it's still early days because heavy snowfall would have to continue for months to get back to normal. The El Nino weather system could also help.</s>JAY LUND: It'll take quite a few large storms. We have a very large cumulative deficit over the last four years, both in reservoirs and in groundwater storage, but it'll take a real gullywasher.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Which has not yet happened.</s>JAY LUND: There's always this promise of El Nino, so we're hopeful that we'll get more rain, but we haven't seen it yet.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: For now, Lund says he welcomes the snowpack results. California will pretty much take water in any form.
California is finally getting some good news about the drought. The water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack was more than 100 percent above average when measured this week.