Beijing is dusted with real snow for a second day.

After more than a week of competing on courses lined with machine-made snow, Olympians in Beijing are waking up again to the sight of real snow. The forecast for Sunday was for light flurries and temperatures around 25 degrees Fahrenheit.

A day earlier, a steady snow had fallen at Zhangjiakou, a city roughly 100 miles northwest of China’s capital that is host to some skiing and snowboarding events. In Yanqing, another competition zone in the mountains outside Beijing, skies were overcast. The region was expected to get two to four inches of snow by Sunday night. A blizzard warning was also in effect through much of Sunday for the Chongli District in Zhangjiakou, according to the Central Meteorological Observatory.

Because Beijing averages less than one inch of snow in the winter months, its skiing and snowboarding sites have been using artificial snow. By contrast, Salt Lake City, the host of the 2002 Winter Games, averages 54 inches of snow a year.

“Finally it feels like the Winter Olympics,” Chris Plys of the U.S. curling team said on Twitter on Sunday. He shared a video of the snowfall on Sunday, adding the hashtag #letitsnow.

Beijing, a water-scarce city, went to great lengths to ensure that there would be enough snow to sustain its run as host of the Winter Olympics. That meant embarking on one of the most extensive snow-making operations in the history of the Games. The herculean effort included flooding a dried riverbed, diverting water from a key reservoir that supplies Beijing, and resettling hundreds of farmers and their families, who were living in what is now the competition area, in high-rise apartments.

Over the past few decades, rapid development has sapped Beijing’s groundwater. July and August often bring heavy rains, but the city and the nearby mountains get only sprinkles of precipitation in the winter.