You are now in California and the U.S. category.

One of the strongest rainstorms of the season is set to gush over the Bay Area on Thursday just as unusually high tides and blustery winds hit, making for what forecasters expect to be a day of mayhem.

City work crews were gearing up for the super soaker that’s forecast to dump up to 2 inches throughout the day in San Francisco and in the East Bay, and twice that amount in parts of the North and South Bay. Commuters all over the Bay Area should expect hellish driving conditions during the morning and afternoon, when the most intense rain sweeps through.

Water regulators plan to allow a lake in Northern California to fill to the brim this winter for the first time since using chemicals to kill off non-native fish.

The Sacramento Bee reports (http://bit.ly/2hli5sQ ) that the Department of Water Resources lowered Lake Davis in the 1990s to prevent storms from washing predatory northern pike into the waterways below the dam, where they could kill native fish.

The Sierra Nevada is getting soaked this year, and Lake Tahoe is one of the biggest beneficiaries.

The sixth-largest lake in the United States, which straddles California and Nevada, reached its natural rim after weekend storms dumped 12.5 billion gallons of water into the lake. A trickle is now flowing through the dam and into the Truckee River. This is a huge milestone for a body of water that has flirted with record-low levels amid an ongoing drought.

The Bureau of Reclamation is preparing for a rare event in recent drought years — to release water from Folsom Lake. Outflow at Folsom Lake will more than double from 3,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 8,000 cfs by Wednesday, according to Justin Moore with the Bureau of Reclamation Mid-Pacific Region. Here’s what you need to know about water releases from Folsom Lake, even though the region is still considered to be in a drought:

FOLSOM LAKE CAPACITY

Folsom Lake has a total capacity of 977,000 acre-feet of water. Currently, it’s at 599,500 acre-feet — around 61 percent of capacity.

Two of three judges on a Ninth Circuit panel Monday indicated they believe the federal government had the authority to release 355 million gallons of water from California’s Trinity Reservoir to prevent a salmon die-off, despite water districts’ claims to the contrary.

San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority and Westlands Water District sued the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Reclamation in 2013 after the government ordered them to release the water to prevent a salmon die-off in the lower Klamath River, rather than deliver the water to cities and farmers during the state’s searing drought.