Storm to dump up to 3 feet of snow in 3 days for Tahoe region

A string of downpours converging on the Bay Area will also unleash as much as three feet of snow in three days on the Lake Tahoe region, forecasters said Wednesday. If one more powerful storm arrives in March after this system departs, resort officials say, the Sierra mountains could easily see the best spring ski conditions since 2011. “This new pattern is just going to open up the storm door for us this weekend,” said Bryan Allegretto, a snowboarder who writes forecasts for the Lake Tahoe region on the website OpenSnow. The system, brewing in the north-central Pacific, is a welcome sign for skiers and state water officials alike. Over the 10-day period starting Wednesday, the median inflow prediction for the state’s largest reservoir, Lake Shasta, is 475,000 acre feet of water, according to Peter Fickenscher, a hydrologist with California Nevada River Forecast Center. Inflows do not represent the total amount by which reservoirs will rise, since regulations from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers require reservoir officials to release water if it reaches a designated threshold in order to avoid flooding. In the last few weeks at Folsom, outflows needed to increase from 3,000 cubic feet per second to 7,200, according to Louis Moore, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that oversees water resource management.