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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The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
A dangerous sequence of storms from the Pacific Ocean is
sweeping through Northern California and the Sierra Nevada
Mountains –– prompting heavy flooding and road closures across
parts of the region during the busy holiday travel season.
… Shasta County and other parts of Northern California
remain under a flood warning until midday
Monday, while much of Central California is under a flood watch
until Friday. … Northern California will see its
heaviest rainfall Monday and Tuesday – when up to 5 inches are
expected across the Northern Sierra and 3 inches along the
coastal regions, the NWS said Sunday. … Heavy snow is
also forecast over the Sierras, where an
additional 2 to 4 feet is expected – a stark contrast
from the snow drought the Sierras are currently experiencing.
… The single most important gathering of Colorado River
Basin officials came and went — with no significant
announcements regarding the often frustrating yet crucial
seven-state negotiations for how to divvy up the river over the
next 20 years. … Experts said at the three-day Colorado
River Water Users Association conference that if meaningful
conservation doesn’t happen in states both upstream and
downstream, leaders in the West could be headed for remarkably
hard decisions about the future. Governors and negotiators from
the seven states have an open invitation to the nation’s
capital, where Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has indicated he
would like to have a joint meeting. Nevada Gov. Joe
Lombardo asked Burgum this month to schedule it for
January.
As Californians break out umbrellas for a rainy holiday,
specialized crews are gearing up to fly their planes directly
into the winter’s incoming atmospheric rivers. … This winter,
leading climate institutions including UC San Diego’s Scripps
Institution of Oceanography are ramping up a research program
that uses the planes to monitor atmospheric rivers —
the ribbons of water vapor in the sky that can drop up
to half of California’s annual precipitation. A goal
of the effort, announced Tuesday, is to improve forecasts from
the current one-week advanced storm warnings to more like two
weeks. … For California, improved forecasts not only
offer residents more time to plan for rain and snow, but the
warning can also make a big difference for reservoir
management in the state.
California is getting plenty of rain this winter — but what’s
really needed is snow. While record high temperatures have
ensured that a series of massive Pacific storms known as
atmospheric rivers dump heavy rain across the West, the balmy
weather has led to one of the lowest snow covers since 2001.
The forecast calls for more rain this week. With all the
warmth, precipitation has fallen as rain instead of snow across
many basins, leading to snow drought … The threats created by
lack of snow in winter or limited overall precipitation are
actually similar: wildfires, future drought and low reservoir
levels. The West’s water supplies are built on snow, which
provides California with 30 percent of its supply.
The Mid-Kings River Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA)
approved a pumping allocation over objections from neighboring
agencies and without any indication it will be approved by the
state. … The Mid-Kings board approved a pumping allocation of
1.43 acre feet per acre of land, more than twice that of the
neighboring South Fork Kings GSA, which is proposing .66 of an
acre foot per acre of land for its farmers. South Fork and
several other entities have objected to Mid-Kings’ allocation,
saying it’s far too generous. … The uncertainty about
state reaction is compounded by the fact that the state isn’t
meeting with water managers in the Tulare Lake subbasin, which
covers most of Kings County, because of a pending legal action.
When the Colorado Water Conservation Board voted unanimously
last month to approve the $99 million purchase of the Shoshone
water rights from Xcel Energy, Western Slope communities called
it a “once-in-a-lifetime” deal. In Grand County, the decision
lands closer to home. For people living at the headwaters of
the Colorado River, it’s a promise that water will keep flowing
west, offering a safeguard for ranchers, recreation businesses
and the river itself. … By securing them permanently for
instream flows, the Colorado River District and its partners
ensured that water will continue downstream even if the aging
plant shuts down.
Local officials are again distributing air purifiers to
residents inundated with pollution from the Tijuana River
sewage crisis after they botched their first attempt to do so.
The first batch of 400 air purifiers distributed through a
lottery system under former District 1 Supervisor Nora Vargas
lacked the necessary filters to clean the gases in the air.
Specifically, the first purifiers lacked the necessary
potassium permanganate and charcoal to effectively filter toxic
gases. A contractor also failed to transfer applicant
information to the San Diego County Air Pollution Control
District, forcing people to reapply for the purifiers without
notification.
The southern steelhead trout has been low in numbers in recent
years, but one Huntington Beach high school is now prepared to
lend a hand toward saving the species. Edison High held a
ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday morning for an expansion to
its campus Innovation Lab, where it will house the endangered
fish through a partnership with the California Department of
Fish and Wildlife. The new system, funded by the Resource
Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains through a
CDFW grant, will protect up to 650 trout rescued from creeks
impacted by drought, wildfire and debris flows. … Two
large holding tanks will contain the trout, while a water
cleansing system ensures they are safe until a new habitat can
be found.
A local renewable energy and critical minerals company is
poised to go public through a merger with a New York-based
special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in a move aimed
at bolstering U.S. energy security and domestic supply chains
for electric vehicles and advanced technologies, according to a
CTR press release. … If completed, the business combination
would list the combined company on a major U.S. stock exchange,
providing capital to accelerate development of ACR’s flagship
Hell’s Kitchen project at the Salton Sea.
… Imperial County officials and residents have long seen
the Salton Sea region — dubbed “Lithium Valley” — as a
potential economic boon, bringing jobs and revenue while
addressing environmental challenges around the shrinking sea.
Dams in the United States may be in worse condition than
previously understood. More than 16,700 dams across the country
are classified as high hazard potential as of 2024, according
to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. Over
2,500 of these dams are in poor condition. But with newly
utilized radar technology, scientists at Virginia Tech are
revealing dams across the United States that may have crumbling
infrastructure hidden from view of safety inspectors. … What
they found was shocking to them: Many dams that should have
been stabilized were still sinking, potentially impacting the
dam’s structure.
The year 2025 saw several big water issues hit the news, both
nationally and in some of the biggest produce-growing states.
Many of these stories will continue into 2026’s headlines. For
example, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers set a water
milestone late in the year when they finally released their
long-awaited updated definition of Waters of the U.S. with
implementation expected in February or March of 2026.
… As the year came to a close, California’s largest
irrigation district released its economic impact review report,
which found that water restrictions had wide-reaching negative
impacts on the state and its people.
The training and use of artificial-intelligence systems such as
ChatGPT might already result in more annual carbon emissions
than New York City and more water consumption than all the
bottled water drank globally, according to new research. In one
of the first studies to focus specifically on the environmental
impact of AI, a new report in the data-science journal Patterns
estimated that the technology’s water consumption in particular
was likely far higher than previous estimates. The study
indicates that both AI’s carbon emissions and its water
consumption are growing rapidly, thanks to its surging power
use.
To find Charles Mallory Hatfield, you usually had to look up.
… For decades, Hatfield danced up and down the state,
promising a heavenly waterfall to a drought-bedeviled world.
Once contracted, he and his brother Paul would quench the
thirst of Central Valley farmers or refill the waterways for
coastal citizens who, without his help, would be reduced to
drinking dust. His quiet alchemy, conducted up on those wooden
platforms out in the hills, always seemed to work.
… Today, Utah bolsters its snowpack by as much as 12% in
a given year, solely through cloud seeding — a
sizable return, considering the state’s needs, but nothing like
what Hatfield could promise.
John Vidovich, who runs Sandridge Partners LLC, one of Kings
County’s largest farming operations, was shut out of gaining a
seat on a groundwater agency for fear he would move native
water outside the area. Board members of the Empire Westside
Irrigation District voted 3-2 at their Dec. 15 meeting to keep
Ceil Howe Jr. as their representative on the South Fork Kings
Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA), rather than switch to
Vidovich. … Last July, Vidovich floated a proposal for
the Southwest Kings GSA – where he controls three of the five
board seats – to merge with the South Fork GSA. … More
recently, Sandridge Partners threatened to sue South Fork GSA
if it adopts a policy prohibiting movement of native
groundwater more than a mile outside its boundaries.
… Who decides the needs and uses of stored water? Who
owns it? It is a fascinating debate that has raged for years,
and the U.S. Supreme Court may be about to weigh in on it
again. A case originating in California has brought the issue
back to the forefront of western jurisprudence. … The case,
City of Fresno, et al. v. United States, et al., began with the
2014 drought, and the Bureau’s decision to withhold available
water from part of the Central Valley Project. Irrigation
districts and municipal suppliers on the east side of the San
Joaquin Valley received a “zero allocation,” while the Bureau
released water to other districts. … Is the Bureau
required to pay for those property losses when taking that
water for other uses it decided were more important? –Written by Greg Walcher, former director of the Colorado
Department of Natural Resources.
Seeking to prevent the California State Water Resources Control
Board from stepping in to regulate groundwater in critically
overdrafted subbasins, local agencies are working to correct
deficiencies in their plans to protect groundwater. With
groundwater sustainability agencies formed and groundwater
sustainability plans evaluated, the state water board has moved
to implement the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,
or SGMA. … Under probation, groundwater extractors in
the Tulare Lake subbasin face annual fees of $300 per well and
$20 per acre-foot pumped, plus a late reporting fee of 25%.
SGMA also requires well owners to file annual groundwater
extraction reports.
Last year’s snow deluge in California, which quickly erased a
two decade long megadrought, was essentially a
once-in-a-lifetime rescue from above, a new study found. Don’t
get used to it because with climate change the 2023 California
snow bonanza —a record for snow on the ground on April 1 — will
be less likely in the future, said the study in Monday’s
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
… UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who wasn’t part
of the study but specializes in weather in the U.S. West, said,
“I would not be surprised if 2023 was the coldest, snowiest
winter for the rest of my own lifetime in California.”
Six tribes in the Upper Colorado River Basin, including two in
Colorado, have gained long-awaited access to discussions about
the basin’s water issues — talks that were formerly
limited to states and the federal government. Under an
agreement finalized this month, the tribes will meet every two
months to discuss Colorado River issues with an interstate
water policy commission, the Upper Colorado River Commission,
or UCRC. It’s the first time in the commission’s 76-year
history that tribes have been formally included, and the timing
is key as negotiations about the river’s future intensify.
… Most immediately, the commission wants a key number:
How much water goes unused by tribes and flows down to the
Lower Basin?
A group of Western lawmakers pressed the Biden administration
Monday to ramp up water conservation, especially in national
forests that provide nearly half the region’s surface water.
“Reliable and sustainable water availability is absolutely
critical to any agricultural commodity production in the
American West,” wrote the lawmakers, including Sens.
Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), in a
letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The 31
members of the Senate and House, all Democrats except for Sen.
Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), credited the administration for
several efforts related to water conservation, including
promoting irrigation efficiency as a climate-smart practice
eligible for certain USDA funding through the Inflation
Reduction Act.
A study led by NASA researchers provides new estimates of how
much water courses through Earth’s rivers, the rates at which
it’s flowing into the ocean, and how much both of those figures
have fluctuated over time—crucial information for understanding
the planet’s water cycle and managing its freshwater supplies.
The results also highlight regions depleted by heavy water use,
including the Colorado River basin in the United States, the
Amazon basin in South America, and the Orange River basin in
southern Africa.
