The animated GIF above shows a Cabin at 7000 ft. at Serene Lake CA (near Soda Springs)
January 1994 to about May 1994 (600 inches of snow fell at this location that year)
The first Chart below shows the water content of the snow pack at 6950 ft. Elevation during the Flood of January 2 1997 Surprisingly the water content of the snow at 6950 ft elevation did not change during the storms.
The Chart below shows the "meltdown" of the snow pack at 5280 ft. Elevation
during the Flood of 1997
Hopefully the CDWR will learn from this Flood of 1997 that when you have a huge water content in snow at low elevations (<7000ft.) and a very big...very warm... storm is coming, we should immediately release water from our resovoirs (to well below the 76% at Oroville) to make room for the COMPLETE melting of the snow pack below 7000ft. The USACE 1968 Flood Plain Study for The Feather and Yuba River reccomened the following..."Until the authorized Marysville Dam is completed, it may be necessary to prolong encroachment into the flood control reservation at Oroville Reservoir and hold back Feather River flows so combined flows of the Feather and Yuba Rivers will not exceed the objective flow of 300,000 cubic feet per second below Marysville and Yuba City. Also, releases up to 210,000 cubic feet per second, the design capacity of Feather River above Yuba City, may be required during a very rare storm."
As the top graph shows we will still have plenty of water in the snow above 7000ft. to fill the resovoirs (for summer).
If our levee system had a SCB slurry core we could release very large amounts of water before the warm storm arrives. We cannot do that now because our levee's become weak at high water.
For an excellant analysis of the "snow melt down" visit the site below...