A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation Writer Matt Jenkins.
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Officials from the United States and Mexico announced Wednesday
a Colorado River water-sharing dealfor next two years as the
basin continues to be overstressed by prolonged drought. The
short-term deal, formally known as Minute 334,
calls for Mexico to cut 250,000 acre-feet, or
more than 100,000 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water, in
both 2027 and 2028. It also establishes an environmental work
group and a pilot program to manage the salinity of
Colorado River water as it reaches Mexico.
… Under the new international plan, Mexico’s share of
the Colorado River could decrease or increase based on
forecasts for upstream reservoir conditions at Lake Mead, on
the Arizona-Nevada border.
Temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are still rising as this
year’s El Niño strengthens. A monthly outlook
published Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Climate Prediction Center gives a 75%
chance that El Niño will become “historic” from October to
December. … L’Heureux explained that the timing
of this precipitation will likely trail behind El Niño’s peak
strength in the ocean. “The outlooks show that the strongest
probabilities for increased precipitation in California
are during December-March,” [Climate Prediction Center
physical scientist Michelle] L’Heureux wrote. … And
oceanographers are also expecting El Niño to temporarily raise
sea levels and bump up winter wave energy, threatening
the coastline with erosion and flooding, especially during
storms.
California’s beloved condors and sea otters have
rebounded from the brink of extinction thanks to the Endangered
Species Act. Now the state is going to court to keep the
50-year-old law intact, filing two lawsuits Wednesday to block
what Democratic leaders describe as the Trump administration’s
rollback of its protections. Attorney General Rob Bonta filed
the suits with a coalition of 21 attorneys general, adding to
dozens California has already filed to combat the Trump
administration’s deregulatory agenda. … Trump’s changes,
finalized in July, rescind a definition of harm that
made it illegal to damage the places that endangered species
call home — effectively opening up habitat where they
shelter, breed and eat to mining, logging and other
development.
Aurora Water is in talks to purchase land and water from two of
the most historic farms in the Lower Arkansas Valley, adding to
farm communities’ worries about “buy and dry” pressure
from cities amid historic drought and a dwindling agricultural
economy. But Aurora Water says it has learned lessons
from past controversies and is structuring the latest buy-up to
preserve southeastern Colorado farm life, not destroy it.
… Recent southeastern Colorado water purchases by Aurora
Water and other utilities have given the agencies rights to dry
up farmland in, for example, three out of 10 years. Many local
farmers and water conservancy officials say that casts
too much uncertainty on a farm owner’s economic plans.
They are also not convinced that farmland can recover after
being completely dried up for entire seasons.
Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil
fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra
to the point they are releasing emissions that could further
worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found.
As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is
thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and
wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are
themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and
carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening
the climate crisis, the paper states. … “This hidden
multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy,
so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is
coming – and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford
to emit,” said Sam Abernethy, a scientist at Spark Climate
Solutions who led the research,
published in Environmental Research Letters.
… The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
announced new agency priorities last week that they say are a
commitment to “cutting bureaucracy, modernizing our science,
and putting our fishing communities first.” But experts say the
agency’s actions will erode fish stocks, threaten endangered
species and surrender marine habitats to destructive trawlers.
… On the table: opening marine national monuments to
commercial fishing operations, scaling back critical habitat
designations to focus more on the downstream economics of
conservation and weakening decades of peer-reviewed science.
The Orange County Water District (OCWD) and the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers (USACE) captured 18.1 billion gallons of
stormwater at Prado Dam between July 2025 and June 2026, the
highest total since the 1940s, according to OCWD. …
Water captured at Prado Dam flows downstream to OCWD’s recharge
facilities in Anaheim and Orange, replenishing the Orange
County Groundwater Basin, which supplies around 85 per cent of
the drinking water for 2.5 million people across north and
central Orange County. During fiscal year 2025-26, Santa Ana
River flows, including captured stormwater, accounted for
roughly 60 per cent of the district’s groundwater recharge.
An Amazon data center under construction in Gilroy is
frustrating a local transparency group and residents who
are voicing concerns about the city’s lack of openness in
allowing the project to move forward. Americans for
Transparency, a grassroots initiative led by Gilroy resident
Georgine Scott-Codiga, filed a formal demand of violations with
Gilroy asking for an admission that the land where the Amazon
data center is being developed has allegedly violated the
California Subdivision Map Act. … Scott-Codiga wants four
issues addressed by the city attorney and Gilroy City Council:
stop accepting Amazon’s water connection applications until the
subdivision issue is resolved; formally investigate whether the
Amazon parcel was illegally created; refer the matter to Santa
Clara County for enforcement; and notify Amazon in writing no
approvals will be issued until the alleged parcel defect is
corrected.
As the Newsom administration nears the end of its term, the
Department of Water Resources (DWR) continues to seek key
approvals for the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP), which would
divert up to 6,000 cubic feet per second from the
Sacramento River in southern Sacramento County and convey it
via a 45-mile long, 40-foot diameter tunnel to the south Delta
for export. The Delta Stewardship Council (Council) has
scheduled a hearing on October 15, 2026, on the three
appeals of DWR’s Revised Certification of Consistency with the
Delta Plan on Remanded Items (Revised Certification) for the
DCP. The Revised Certification responds to deficiencies
identified in the Council’s April Decision D20257 on DWR’s
October 2025 certification for the DCP.
The $5.8 million San Diego County supervisors approved Sept. 1
for the Tijuana Sewage Crisis won’t build a sewage treatment
plant. It funds design and engineering work — the first step,
supervisors say, before the county can chase the hundreds of
millions of dollars an actual fix will cost. Supervisors
approved the funding in a 4-1 vote, framing it as San Diego’s
answer to decades of waiting on Mexico and the federal
government, according to its champions, Supervisors Terra
Lawson-Remer and Paloma Aguirre. The money will fund design for
a permanent box culvert fix at Saturn Boulevard and engineering
work on a capture and cleanup system that Aguirre described as
the first infrastructure the county would build to capture and
treat river flows directly, on U.S. soil.
Amid perpetual drought, population growth, and trillions of
gallons of water used in desert agriculture, much of America’s
West is in desperate need of more rain and snow. A team of
engineers at a Southern California tech company say they
believe drones could be part of a solution. The team at
Rainmaker says drones are the most precise and cost-effective
way of cloud seeding, a process that uses molecules of silver
iodide to attract water droplets and enhance the amount rain
and snow that falls. To produce more rain than would occur
naturally, Rainmaker sends a drone into a cloud that is not yet
producing rain or snow and releases silver iodide — an ice
nucleating molecule — from the drone.
The huge inland body of water that is the heart of California’s
water system is under major stress. That’s why state officials
say they worked for years to come up with a plan to help halt
the ecological decline of the San Francisco Bay and
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Now that plan is
under attack from the Trump administration and the largest
irrigation authority in the Central Valley. In a letter,
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says California’s plan
for the Delta will shortchange farmers by restricting how much
water the federal government pumps from the state’s largest
rivers. The letter says the plan threatens the “entire
fabric of California’s agricultural economy.”
The drama engulfing the seven states in the Colorado River
Basin could take another, more perilous, turn in a few weeks.
Water experts are warning that by October, the river’s
flow may cross a critical threshold at Lee’s Ferry, a
bend in the river in Arizona that has been a bellwether of the
river’s health for decades. The 1922 Colorado River Compact —
the river’s foundational agreement — states that the river’s
flow must stay above a certain level at Lee’s Ferry in order to
provide enough water for downstream states. If the flow
falls below that point, which some experts equate to a
“tripwire,” it could trigger prolonged and expensive
litigation at the Supreme Court, a turning point that
could have terrible consequences for basin states.
The sea level along California’s coast will increase by
about a foot by mid-October due to the influence of El
Niño, which is driving a large volume of water
northward from offshore of Mexico and Central America. This
water is coming in the form of a coastal “Kelvin wave,” and it
will mark the arrival of one of the first significant impacts
of the powerhouse El Niño taking shape in the tropical Pacific.
… Patrick Barnard, research director at the Center for
Coastal Climate Resilience at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, said the ocean height increase puts many
coastal residents at risk of flooding. “Because so
many of our communities are built right at sea level on the
West Coast, and our extreme water levels don’t vary widely,
every 2 to 4 inches of sea level doubles our flood risk,”
Barnard said.
Turn on a hose in Denver this summer and the
water likely flows from the Strontia Springs
Reservoir. The small manmade lake in the mountains
just west of downtown stores the state’s precious snowmelt and
distributes it through the dry months, when rain grows scarce
and farmers are irrigating frantically. But over its 44 years,
Strontia has lost much of its ability to store water.
The reservoir is now almost one-fifth full of sediment
— sand, silt and mud. Most of the country’s 90,000 or
so storage reservoirs are facing a similar problem. These dams
are in a self-propelling sediment loop. Climate change is
exacerbating drought and wildfires, destroying plants that hold
soil in place. … The country has lost an
estimated 8% of its water storage capacity, the
equivalent of 25.5 million Olympic-size swimming pools,
according to a study published this week in Nature.
A long-running effort to better protect Trinity River
salmon while supporting tribal fishing traditions is
entering a new phase this fall, as the California Department of
Fish and Wildlife and the Hoopa Valley Tribe begin
operating a single, jointly run fish weir for monitoring and
harvest. The Bureau of Reclamation joined its partners
for a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the consolidation,
which is intended to strengthen collaboration, improve the
efficiency of Trinity River restoration monitoring, and reduce
stress on salmon migrating upriver to spawn. CDFW Director
Meghan Hertel said the department and the Hoopa Valley Tribe
have worked for more than a decade to resolve the issue
of operating two separate weirs and bring the work together at
one location.
Creekstone Energy, the company behind a huge data center campus
being built near Delta in Millard County, has announced that
it’s in the process of patenting a “revolutionary
technology” that can turn natural gas into
water. The new technology — which the developer
said can capture water vapor from the exhaust of Creekstone’s
own natural-gas-powered electricity generation and convert it
into water — has been named GIGAWATER, which the company said
is the “centerpiece” of its Project Oasis initiative at
the Delta Gigasite campus. … Conley believes
the new water could potentially be used for a variety
of purposes: irrigation, agriculture, geothermal
energy cycles, and potentially — if it’s filtered — potable
water.
Aaron Baker, a 25-year veteran of the Santa Clara Valley Water
District, on Tuesday was named CEO by the agency’s board,
taking the helm of Silicon Valley’s largest water district
after a year of political turmoil and as a winter looms that
could be marked by extreme weather due to very strong El Niño
conditions. Also known as “Valley Water,” the district, based
in San Jose, is a government agency that provides drinking
water and flood protection to 2 million people in Santa Clara
County. … Baker’s position as CEO begins Jan. 4. He will
succeed interim CEO Melanie Richardson, who came out of
retirement from the district last year following the
administrative leave and then resignation of former CEO
Rick Callender.
A year ago, Lee Zeldin, head of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), visited the Tijuana River, one
of the nation’s most polluted rivers, and vowed to act
urgently to stop the crisis. Now, the federal agency is
committing to bringing the same sense of urgency to
another heavily polluted river more than 100 miles east of the
San Diego-Mexico border in Imperial Valley. “Our
commitment here to you is that we’re here to do the same,” Mike
Martucci, acting regional administrator for EPA’s Region 9,
said at a recent roundtable in Calexico. The agency and the
U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) hosted
the meeting last month to announce their latest efforts to stop
the decades-long, cross-border problem.
Katie Hobbs and Andy Biggs, the Democrat and Republican
nominees for governor, have wildly different plans for
Arizona’s water future. That means the choice voters make this
November will point the state in one of two approaches when it
comes to managing the state’s water supply: conservation or
augmentation. Whichever candidate wins will have a great deal
of control over Arizona’s water future over the next four years
— including representing the state in the next round of
Colorado River negotiations in 2028. The governor also
directs the state Department of Water Resources, and has the
power to accept or reject water-related state legislation
coming out of the state Legislature.
