(Wines&Vines) - With heavy storms just past, California expects more rain this week. It won’t end the drought, but it will certainly help: “Before the rainy pattern takes a break, cumulative rainfall will have taken a huge slice out of the long-term drought,” said AccuWeather.com meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

The biggest rains came Dec. 11, when an average of 2.5 inches of rain fell across the state and far more fell on some areas: Northern Sonoma County received almost 5 inches in a day, sending a massive surge down the Russian River.

Nevertheless, the California Department of Water Resources estimates the state will need six more storms like this to fill its 12 major reservoirs and bring an end to the long-term drought. “We’re a long way from the precipitation levels needed to get us out of a drought,” said spokesman Doug Carlson. “We need to get 150% of normal rainfall to make a dent in the state’s water shortage.”

At present, the major state reservoirs stand at 54% of total average storage, 8 million acre-feet of water compared to the average of 15 million acre-feet. Most large reservoirs are still below the level of a year ago, though some smaller reservoirs are at average, or even higher.

Lake Shasta, the largest with 4.5 million acre-feet of capacity, is at 52% of average storage, but that’s only 31% of its total capacity.

California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from its three-year drought, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimates after studying water resources using satellite data. “It takes years to get into a drought of this severity, and it will likely take many more big storms, and years, to crawl out of it,” said Jay Famiglietti of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Meanwhile, other NASA satellite data showed that so far this year, the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada range is only half previous estimates.