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In these elevated locations, the prefrontal winds lifted the low-level subtropical moisture over California’s mountain ranges and cooled it approximately 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit for each 1,000 feet of elevation. This process is called the saturated adiabatic lapse rate, which wrings out the moisture from the heavens like squeezing a wet sponge or mop — in other words, orthographic enhancement. Rainfall amounts in the Santa Lucia Mountains have been breathtaking. Rocky Butte has logged 79 inches; typically this station receives about 40 inches a year.

The fractured spillway at Oroville Dam has forced the state to spend tens of millions of dollars on emergency repairs, with millions more to come. Here’s another potential cost: a slice of California’s water supply. Dam operators are expected to run Lake Oroville, the state’s second largest reservoir, at lower-than-usual water levels this summer as they wrestle with the complicated and lengthy task of fixing the dam’s broken spillway.

As California water officials confirmed Thursday that the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada remains well above average, pressure was mounting on the state to lift emergency water restrictions that have been in place for two years. The snowpack across the mountains is now 164 percent of average, a closely watched marker in the nation’s most populous state — and biggest economy — where one-third of all the drinking water comes from snow-fed reservoirs.

The skies were gray, snow was falling and it was bitterly cold when state snow survey chief Frank Gehrke made his monthly march out to a deep pillow of snow in the Sierra Nevada town of Phillips on Thursday morning. He plodded across the white mounds, plunged his metallic pole into the powder beneath him, pulled it out and made his proclamation: 94 inches deep. The 2016-17 winter created one of the largest snowpacks in California’s recorded history and it’s loaded with enough water to keep reservoirs and rivers swollen for months to come.

The biggest blizzards are over. But as state water officials head into the Sierra Nevada on Thursday for the annual April 1 snowpack reading — the most important of the year for planning summer water supplies — California still has a huge amount of snow covering its highest mountain peaks, an avalanche that has buried the state’s punishing drought. On Tuesday, the statewide Sierra snowpack stood at 164 percent of its historic average, a massive accumulation of new water. It’s the largest snowpack since 2011, when it was 171 percent of normal on April 1.