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Water news you need to know

A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Vik Jolly

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Aquafornia news E&E News by Politico

Tuesday Top of the Scroll: House releases Interior-EPA spending bill with deep cuts

House Republican appropriators unveiled their fiscal 2026 funding legislation for the Interior Department and EPA, with steep cuts proposed for both agencies. The bill would approve about $38 billion for agencies under its purview, nearly $3 billion below the fiscal 2025 amount. Interior would get about $14.8 billion and EPA would be funded at $7 billion, a 23 percent cut for the environment agency. The legislation is, however, more generous than the president’s budget request. … EPA would receive roughly $7 billion from the legislation in fiscal 2026, about a $2.1 billion or 23 percent decrease from its enacted funding this year. … That sum includes $2.1 billion for the agency’s Clean Water and Drinking Water state revolving funds, which Trump proposed to eliminate almost in their entirety in his plan. That is still $662 million below current levels, Democratic lawmakers noted in their bill summary.

Other water and environmental project funding news:

Aquafornia news CalMatters

Can Calif. stop the spread of a new invader in its water supplies?

One of the state’s best investigators was on the hunt for golden mussels — a dangerous new invader in California’s waters, with a reputation for destruction.  Wearing a collar and a tongue-lolling grin, Allee, a Belgian Malinois, sniffed along the glittering hull of a bass boat at an inspection station in Butte County. … The dog was searching for any hint of the thimble-sized mussels hidden in the nooks and crannies of boats headed to Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir, or two smaller reservoirs nearby. … State water managers made the alarming discovery last October that golden mussels, which are native to China and Southeast Asia, had invaded the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta —  the core of California’s massive water delivery systems. … Now the mussels are here to stay. They cannot be eradicated. Water suppliers bracing for the onslaught have instead turned their efforts to shoring up pipes, pumps and treatment plants against the infestation. 

Aquafornia news UC Santa Cruz

News release: Here’s how we help an iconic California fish survive the gauntlet of today’s highly modified waterways

… [T]he Central Valley Salmon Ecology Group, a team of researchers that bridge academia and resource management facilitated by the Fisheries Collaborative Program (FCP) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has come up with a playbook for how water managers can tweak the timing, temperature and volume of releases to dramatically increase the odds of juvenile salmon surviving the perilous journey to the open ocean. The approach, called “facilitated migration,” is detailed in a paper published on July 3 by the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecological Applications. … The paper’s authors present both a conceptual framework, which could apply to other species that migrate in highly modified environments, and practical steps spelled out in operational terms that water managers can understand and implement. The study shows that the approach can increase successful juvenile-salmon migrations by 40 to 400%.

Other anadromous fish news:

Aquafornia news The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.)

Sonoma County officials try to ease water-shortage fears sparked by Potter Valley Project decommissioning plan

When it comes to the planned decommissioning of PG&E’s Potter Valley Project ― the hydroelectric power plant and two related dams in Northern California ― there seem to be two schools of thought in Sonoma County. One: Save the dams, at all costs. … Two: Accept the inevitable, at all costs. … Now, as Pacific Gas & Electric Co. prepares to file its plans by July 29 to the federal government to decommission the project, the rift between those two schools is widening. The chasm was on display during a July 1 town hall hosted by the Sonoma County Farm Bureau at the Finley Community Center in Santa Rosa. … The questions revolve around how hundreds of thousands of customers would continue to have access to water once PG&E stops diverting water from the Eel River to the Russian River ― a move that is likely still a decade away.

Other dam removal news:

Aquafornia news AP News

NASA website won’t publish major climate change reports

The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people. Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark. Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it. At the time, the White House said NASA would house the reports to comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, which the space agency said it planned to do. But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans. … “The USGCRP (the government agency that oversees and used to host the report) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data,” NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. 

Other climate science news:

Aquafornia news E&E News by Politico

AI couldn’t forecast Texas floods. Trump’s NOAA cuts won’t help.

Artificial intelligence is showing promise when it comes to weather forecasting, but it still couldn’t predict the Texas floods. The best-performing weather models during the July 4 floods were traditional ones specially designed to produce local forecasts at high resolution. Global-scale models were far less accurate — and so were AI models, weather experts say. “All those new fancy AI models? They missed it too,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources, in a live YouTube talk on July 7. Some meteorologists say that could change. AI weather models are starting to exhibit an ability for deep learning of atmospheric physics, which means they could be capable of forecasting unprecedented weather events based on atmospheric conditions.

Other weather forecasting news:

Aquafornia news Tucson Sentinel (Ariz.)

Tucson deal: ‘Project Blue’ data centers would thirst for water & electricity

A pair of data centers proposed for Tucson would use more water than four golf courses when fully built out, and be energized with more power than any other TEP customer, according to city documents released Monday. … The initial project, on the Southeast Side, will require annexation into the city to procure the massive amounts of water required to cool the planned operation. Another associated data center is being planned for a different location somewhere within the city limits, officials said. A third site is being studied for yet another data center in the region, but outside of the city limits, the city’s newly released documents said. The city posted the documents and a message from Thomure on a “Project Blue — Facts and Information” section of its website Monday afternoon. Just the first two sites combined would require nearly 2,000 acre-feet of water per year, making them Tucson Water’s largest customer.

Other data center water use news:

Aquafornia news Public Policy Institute of California

Blog: Algae — friend or foe?

Algae are nutritious organisms that lie at the base of many marine food chains. But there seem to be more stories about harmful algal blooms (HABs) sickening both people and animals in recent years. We asked Dr. Raphael Kudela of UC Santa Cruz to explain what’s going on. … “A nice meta-analysis a few years ago took global datasets and looked for an increase in HABs. It showed that globally, there has not been a consistent increase. But if you break it down by region and organism, some regions are seeing increases, some are flat, and some are decreasing. We’re interested in where HABs are happening more. We see problems where we’re putting extra nutrients into the water, for instance through wastewater discharge. Urea, ammonia, and other forms of nitrogen pose particular problems. We also suspect that climate change is having an effect.”

Aquafornia news Union of Concerned Scientists

Blog: Best practices for just land transitions in California

Unsustainable groundwater overpumping in California has triggered the need to transition hundreds of thousands of acres of irrigated agricultural land into less water-intensive activities to make water use sustainable. … After years of work done by our community of practice and scientists, we just published a much needed and comprehensive framework for best practices in cropland repurposing that can benefit everyone involved. This community of practice includes community leaders, farmer and farmworker advocates, scientists, and practitioners across California’s agricultural regions. … In addition to our recent Roadmap for a Just Land Transition, our team of 54 coauthors (with the help of many collaborators and participants in public events) published a paper introducing a framework for best practices in cropland repurposing in the journal Frontiers in Water. In the next sections of this blog I will briefly summarize some of the most important takeaways from this work.

Other groundwater news:

Aquafornia news Manteca Bulletin

Opinion: Cloud seeding is old hat in Central Sierra

Cloud seeding has been conducted off and in the central Sierra — including the north fork of the Stanislaus River — since the 1950s. … There have been some groups, including the National Park Service responsible for the 1,169 square miles within Yosemite National Park, seeking to end the practice due to concerns the chemicals used can cause damage to ecological systems. The California Department of Water Resources’ latest published study on “precipitation enhancement resource management” references previous research that notes winter orographic cloud seeding can improve precipitation between 4 and 15 percent. Orographic cloud seeding is where wind blows over a mountain range causing clouds and rain or snow to fall by lifting the air. It is an entirely different process than what is used in areas such as Central Texas.
–Written by Dennis Wyatt, editor of the Manteca Bulletin.

Aquafornia news E&E News by Politico

BLM continues geothermal energy support with planned lease sales

The Bureau of Land Management is planning two large geothermal lease sales in the next two months that will advance the Trump administration’s public lands agenda backing this particular renewable energy source. The two planned lease sales — the first in August in California and the second in Idaho in September — will cover nearly 50,000 acres of public lands and cumulatively could result in power plant development capable of powering about 70,000 homes. … It was part of the massive tax and energy bill Congress approved, and President Donald Trump signed into law this month, that also set the stage to end wind and solar project tax credits in the next two years. … The Trump administration has made it clear that geothermal power — which generally involves pumping up naturally heated water from deep underground to produce steam that runs electric generators — is its preferred renewable energy sector on public lands.

Other public land sale news:

Aquafornia news Tahoe Daily Tribune (South Lake Tahoe, Calif.)

Tahoe Conservancy set to demolish former Motel 6, make way for restoration

This month, the California Tahoe Conservancy, in cooperation with the California Department of General Services, will begin demolishing the former Motel 6 on the Conservancy’s Upper Truckee Marsh South property in South Lake Tahoe. … The Upper Truckee Marsh South property was one of the most consequential environmental acquisitions in years for the Lake Tahoe Basin. In joining with partners to acquire the property in 2024, the Conservancy gained the opportunity to remove development from ecologically valuable floodplain along the Upper Truckee River. … The Conservancy has preserved the mountain meadow and wetlands that surround the former motel site, and has begun engaging the public on future wetland habitat restoration and enhanced recreation and access.

Other wetland restoration news:

Aquafornia news Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office

News release: Siskiyou County declares emergency over alleged toxic pesticide use at illegal cannabis grows

In response to escalating threats to public health, first responders, and the environment, the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors has unanimously declared a local emergency due to the pervasive use of illegal, foreign-labeled pesticide fumigants at illicit cannabis cultivation sites throughout the unincorporated areas of Siskiyou County. The resolution cites a disturbing rise in the use of highly toxic and unregistered pesticide products, most of which are labeled in Chinese and imported illegally. These substances, found routinely at illegal grow sites, include dangerous mixtures of insecticides (such as organophosphates, carbamates, pyrethroids, and chlorinated hydrocarbons), fungicides, and herbicides. Many of these chemicals are classified as carcinogens under California’s Proposition 65, toxic air contaminants, or groundwater pollutants.

Aquafornia news UC San Diego

News release: For tastier and hardier citrus, researchers built a tool for probing plant metabolism

A new tool allows researchers to probe the metabolic processes occurring within the leaves, stems, and roots of a key citrus crop, the clementine. The big picture goal of this research is to improve the yields, flavor and nutritional value of citrus and non-citrus crops, even in the face of increasingly harsh growing conditions and growing pest challenges. To build the tool, the team — led by the University of California San Diego — focused on the clementine (Citrus clementina), which is a cross between a mandarin orange and a sweet orange. The effort is expected to expand well beyond the clementine in order to develop actionable information for increasing the productivity and quality of a wide range of citrus and non-citrus crops. The strategy is to uncover – and then make use of – new insights on how plants respond, in terms of metabolic activities in specific parts of the plant or tree, to environmental factors like temperature, drought and disease.

Aquafornia news E&E News by Politico

Monday Top of the Scroll: Inside the ‘revolutionary’ new Colorado River proposal

In the contentious talks over how states will split the shrinking Colorado River, negotiators are reaching consensus on one point: Just go with the “natural flow.” The concept is a somewhat simple one. Instead of negotiating future cuts across the entire seven-state region, the process would rely on recent water records — the amount of water flowing from the Colorado River headwaters in the Upper Basin to a point in Arizona marking the boundary of the Lower Basin states. Negotiators recently heralded the move as a potential breakthrough in the long-stalled talks: It could help end a stalemate over how to share the pain of future water reductions and at the same time respond to the impacts of climate change. But that belies a set of lingering questions. For one, just determining the water in the river will require complex calculations relying on evolving research. Even more critically, there’s no indication negotiators are close on the particularly difficult issue of deciding how big a share of water each group of states can claim. Still, observers say it could mark an important change.

Other Colorado River Basin news:

Aquafornia news Colorado Public Radio

Trump budget proposal eliminates funding for Western water conservation grants

As Congress starts work on the next government funding bills, President Trump is proposing eliminating a key water conservation program that’s sent more than $3.2 billion to Western states since 2010. The program, known as WaterSMART and run by the Bureau of Reclamation, provides federal dollars to local governments and organizations in the West to address worsening drought and water scarcity.  WaterSMART grants, combined with state and local dollars, have funded more than 2,350 projects addressing water conservation, habitat restoration, water recycling, drought preparedness and more. … The budget proposal strips the Bureau of Reclamation of around $600 million from its current budget of around $1.86 billion, according to an analysis by the Association of California Water Agencies, a policy and trade group. The proposal zeroes out funding for WaterSmart, as well as other water programs at BOR. 

Other water project funding news:

Aquafornia news San Francisco Chronicle

Mono Lake has seen a shocking change. Experts trace it to a wet California winter

Every spring, tens of thousands of California gulls, some from the Bay Area, leave their home on the coast for a lengthy flight over the Sierra Nevada to summer at Mono Lake. There, the next generation of birds is born. Last year, however, long-simmering problems with the gull population exploded into view. The number of chicks that hatched at Mono Lake dropped to its lowest level on record: just 324 birds, down from about 11,000 chicks the prior year, according to a new report by the research group Point Blue Conservation Science. The dramatic decline is not only raising questions about the future of the gulls, but it’s rekindling concern about how the iconic lake 200 miles from San Francisco is being managed. … Those working to protect the lake see the record-low gull numbers as a sign that the water restrictions haven’t gone far enough and need to be revisited.

Other water and wildlife news:

Aquafornia news The New York Times

The future of weather prediction is here. Maybe.

… There are two ways to better predict the weather: Measure it more accurately, or describe how it works in more excruciating scientific detail. Enter WindBorne, a start-up in Palo Alto, Calif. … The good news is that we may be poised to enter a new golden age of A.I.-enabled weather prediction. … There’s a catch, though. These new deep learning forecasts are built on data provided for free by public science agencies. In the United States, that relationship is threatened by the Trump administration’s heavy cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which houses the National Weather Service. … For now, weather forecasting models based on deep learning remain dependent on data releases from the physics-based models at the public weather agencies.

Other weather forecasting and NOAA news:

Aquafornia news BBC

The deepening water shortage row between the US and Mexico

After the thirtieth consecutive month without rain, the townsfolk of San Francisco de Conchos in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua gather to plead for divine intervention. … Under the terms of a 1944 water-sharing agreement, Mexico must send 430 million cubic metres of water per year from the Rio Grande to the US. … Following pressure from Republican lawmakers in Texas, the Trump administration warned Mexico that water could be withheld from the Colorado River unless it fulfils its obligations under the 81-year-old treaty. … Since then, Mexico has transferred an initial 75 million cubic metres of water to the US via their shared dam, Amistad, located along the border, but that is just a fraction of the roughly 1.5 billion cubic metres of Mexico’s outstanding debt. … Farmers on the Mexican side read the agreement differently. They say it only binds them to send water north when Mexico can satisfy its own needs, and argue that Chihuahua’s ongoing drought means there’s no excess available. 

Other U.S.-Mexico water news:

Aquafornia news The Desert Review (Brawley, Calif.)

4.3-Magnitude earthquake rattles Salton Sea, followed by swarm of smaller quakes

 A 4.3-magnitude earthquake struck near the Salton Sea early Friday morning, jolting residents and triggering a series of smaller quakes in the seismically active region. The temblor, centered approximately 7.5 miles west-northwest of Calipatria, occurred at 2:55 a.m. PDT at a depth of 6.5 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). … Interestingly, recent research suggests that the shrinking Salton Sea may be delaying a major quake. As the lake—formed [refilled] in 1905 by a breach in the Colorado River—dries up due to drought and reduced runoff, the reduced water weight is easing stress on the San Andreas Fault. A 2023 study by San Diego State University and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that when the basin filled with water historically, it increased seismic activity by lubricating faults. The current drying trend may be stabilizing the fault, though it could also mean greater stress accumulation for a future rupture.

Other Salton Sea news: