The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) will conduct this year’s fifth and final snow survey on May 1.

Manual surveys up and down the state will be combined with electronic readings from remote sensors to indicate the rate at which the mountain snowpack is melting into the state’s streams, reservoirs and aquifers.

The snowpack normally provides about a third of the water for California’s homes, industry and agriculture.

April 2 measurements showed that water content in the winter snowpack – often called California’s frozen reservoir – was only 55 percent of normal at the time of year when it historically is at its peak.  On Thursday it was 46 percent of normal.

Above average reservoir storage is the good news for water supply this year, the agency reported.

With Lake Oroville in Butte County – the State Water Project’s principal storage reservoir – 93 percent full (113 percent of normal for the date), DWR expects to be able to deliver a not unusually low 60 percent of the slightly more than 4 million acre-feet of SWP water requested.

DWR will collect manual snowpack water content readings over the next several days.

In the interim, real-time electronic readings indicate that snowpack water content is 76 percent of normal in the northern mountain ranges, 43 percent of normal in the central Sierra, and 26 percent of normal in the southern Sierra. The statewide reading is 46 percent.

Electronic snowpack readings are available on the Internet at http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/snow/DLYSWEQ .

Electronic reservoir level readings may be found at http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action .