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

A proposal to solve a long-running San Joaquin Valley irrigation drainage dispute between the Westlands Water District and the federal government is roiling a Congress already hung up on other California water fights.

The further complications surfaced Tuesday at a House of Representatives hearing that illuminated how the drainage proposal pits one California region against another even as, for a change, it unites Westlands with the Obama administration.

NASA researchers have found that years of California’s drought conditions have not slowed the regrowth of tree and shrub cover in areas burned by wildfires.

One of the nation’s top centers for science will look at how stormwater seeps into almond orchards in the Modesto area and beyond.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced Monday that it has joined a groundwater recharge study that already involves the Almond Board of California and other partners.

The lab, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy, works in several scientific disciplines. The Modesto-based board is paying it $105,840 to use chemical, geophysical and other tools for tracking water through aquifers.

 

Water management plans for agricultural water districts will be expanded, and more districts will be required to submit the plans, under an executive order issued last week by California Gov. Jerry Brown. The requirements came as part of an order that also requires urban water agencies to make permanent a number of water-efficiency measures instituted last year at the height of the California drought.

The agricultural provisions of the governor’s order include that the state Department of Water Resources work with the state Department of Food and Agriculture to update existing requirements for agricultural water management plans.

 

The last time two states went to war over water, it was 1934. The combatants were California and Arizona and the casus belli was the start of construction of Parker Dam, which would direct water from the Colorado River into California via the Colorado River Aqueduct.

The episode unfolded with a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan absurdity. Arizona’s governor, Benjamin Baker Moeur, dispatched a handful of National Guardsmen upriver in a ferryboat named the Julia B., which frontline correspondents dispatched to the river by The Times and other California newspapers happily dubbed the “Arizona Navy.”