All the rivers (except for a few way north) are down 2 to 4 feet from their big melt high of last week so there is some capacity there for runoff. The southern part of the state had long been snow free and was very dry so south of the lake there is capacity for the soil to soak up some rainfall.
The Lakeport dam outflow is not unusually high so the operators there seem to be content to let the lake go up a bit more for now.
Bizer's lake level chart is very interesting because of its historic picture. Almost every year the lake starts rising steadily and then sometime between mid April to mid June there is a bump up that I would suspect is associated with either a single very big (6+ inch) rainfall or a rapid sequence of smaller rain events. Over all it is pretty common for the lake to go over "full" for a while in the spring.
The rest of the week is forecast to be dry. My seat of the pants
guess is that if we get 2 inches or less not much exciting will happen. If we get 4 inches there will probably be flooding in the areas commonly prone to spring flooding and drying out in a day or two.
Do you think we could train Woolly bear caterpillars to do flood forecasts?
