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After five years of drought and now all this precipitation there’s so much snow in the Sierra Nevada that state water officials are preparing for a massive runoff year. But the traditional way of calculating the snowpack has a huge margin of error. A new way to measure it could greatly decrease that inconsistency. Every winter and spring a network of snow surveyors manually tally how much snow is in the Sierra Nevada. They do this by measuring snow depth in the same spots every year.

Officials say Californians are using less water than they have in years, thanks partly to winter rains that are doing the lawn-watering for them. The Water Resources Control Board said Tuesday that the average Californian used just 58.1 gallons of water a day in January. That’s the lowest residential use since the state started tracking water use in summer 2014.

Satellite photographs from the NASA Earth Observatory show the striking difference in California’s drought-ravaged landscape after ceaseless storms soaked the state at the start of 2017. These images taken from space reveal the dramatic changes that have unfolded across the state between 2014, amid the a multi-year drought, and winter 2017, a season marked by record rain- and snowfall.

Gov. Jerry Brown asked President Donald Trump on Tuesday to declare a major disaster for California due to damage caused by heavy rains that hit the state from Jan. 18 to 23. “This record-breaking precipitation resulted in numerous rivers, creeks and streams again exceeding flood stages throughout California,” Brown wrote Trump, saying the storms caused flooding, breached levees, left an estimated 55,000 homes and businesses without power, and led to six deaths. A presidential disaster declaration would make available federal assistance to reimburse state and local costs, small-business loans and other programs.

Water was running again through the Hyatt Powerhouse beneath Oroville Dam on Monday evening. Water was sent through the hydroelectric power plant Friday for the first time since Feb. 10, but the flow was shut off about 10 a.m. Saturday when Department of Water Resources officials realized they needed a bigger channel through the debris at the base of the damaged main spillway for the powerhouse to operate at full capacity.