The Sierra snowpack, which is responsible for more than 60 percent of California’s water, won’t likely make it back to its pre-drought levels until 2019, scientists said in a study published this week, dashing the hopes of those who believed one extremely wet El Niño year could alleviate the state’s water crisis.

In the study, published Tuesday in a journal of the American Geophysical Union, scientists from UCLA concluded that there is a more than 70 percent chance that the Sierra snowpack will take three years to make it back to average levels, after reaching a historic low in March 2015.