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The California seasonal snowpack is one of the most valuable natural water storage reservoirs in the United States, with 7 of the 10 most productive agricultural counties in the nation depending on irrigation from the annual Sierra Nevada spring runoff. However, many water management agencies throughout the state are nervously anticipating the climatic extremes of the last decade to continue and wondering how such annual extremes will affect seasonal runoff forecast performance. One way to speculate as to what the future may hold is to examine how basins have responded to extreme conditions of the recent past using climate reanalysis datasets and measured runoff. Here, we leverage an hourly, 4-km reanalysis product that synthesizes multiple large-scale observational and analysis datasets-known as the Analysis of Record for Calibration (AORC) developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric …