Perspective and magnitude. Here's a satellite photo of how the snowpack looks today.
That's Los Angeles at the bottom. ~350 miles up along the coast is San Francisco (about 2/3's of the way up the picture). For scale you can clearly see Lake Tahoe and Mono Lake. The top half of SF bay and the Sacramento River are brown due to the massive amount of run off happening.
That massive 600+ mile long (it extends well above the top of the photo), 90+ mile wide streak of white? That's our snowpack, 1' to 30' deep. That's the volume of water we're talking about, and that's the area that it's spread out across. This is why the 'bUiLD MaoR DamNS aN sTorAgE!' argument is laughed at. Every major watershed on the Sierra already has dams on it, but their primary function is flood control, not storage. Storage is a secondary function. If you're really hell bent on storage, dam the Golden Gate, or dam the Carquinez straight. Flood the entire Central Valley to elevation 100. Suffer the environmental disaster that would follow. But that is the size of what we're talking about here.
Another data point, if you don't like Lake Mead or Winnipeasauke as a unit of measurement, the storm dropped approximately 75% of Lake Ontario on us. So if you want to envision what it might look like, cut and paste that right on over.
Bookmarks