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The city of Santa Barbara won’t pursue a subsurface ocean intake for its desalination plant after a study revealed that the process would either be infeasible or fail to meet the city’s needs.

Like most desalination plants, the city’s plant has an open water intake pipe in the ocean, but environmentalists say that process kills microorganisms and other sea life. In response to the concerns, the city commissioned a study to evaluate six different ways to extract water through a subsurface — from the seabed — process.

Drought conditions in California have actually improved this week as a steady stream of storms and rain pelted the state, according to this week’s Drought Monitor report.

Currently, about 74 percent of the state is experiencing severe drought, a 10 percent improvement over last week’s report. However, the California drought has caused unparalleled devastation to the region, and will continue to do so barring any significant increase in annual rainfall or extreme intervention.

After years of drought, Northern California has so much water that the state’s two largest reservoirs are releasing water to maintain flood-control safety.

The water releases from Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville don’t mean the drought is over. But they represent the latest evidence that drought conditions are easing as El Niño has brought meaningful amounts of rain and snow to Northern California for the first time since 2012. Yet the free-flowing water remains a significant source of controversy throughout Northern California.

Despite predictions of winter coming in like Godzilla across California, the season didn’t have the claws and teeth that some forecasters expected.

Snow and rainfall was heavier than average this winter — which ended on Saturday — but not by much, a disappointment to some considering the season had a strong El Niño weather pattern. That phenomenon, caused by warmer-than-average water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, has the potential to help generate a wet winter for much of California.

After receiving nearly 5 feet of rain since October, there is too much water in Lake Shasta, according to the agency that manages Shasta Dam.

After four years of drought, the lake has finally reached levels not seen in five years, according to Shane Hunt, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. But bureau officials, worried about the high inflow into the lake from recent heavy rains, have also had to increase the amount of water coming out of Shasta and Keswick dams to reduce the chances of downstream flooding.