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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced funding to five institutions to research human and ecological health impacts associated with water reuse and conservation practices.

“Increasing demand for water resources is putting pressure on the finite supply of drinking water in some areas of the United States,” said Thomas A. Burke, EPA Science Advisor and Deputy Assistant Administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “The research announced today will help us manage and make efficient use of the water supply in the long term.”

California’s snowpack usually reaches its peak in the early spring each year near the first of April. Melting of the snowpack increases as the sun’s path across the sky moves a little northward each day and solar radiation intensifies on the ground.

Snowpack surveys by the Department of Water Resource (DWR) in late March and early April are indicators of how much water California will reap from the melting snowpack, which in normal years provides about 30 percent of the state’s water.

As noted in a March 18 Reuters article by Karen Braun, the very strong El Niño event is showing signs that it is rapidly unwinding, and when it does, there could be some major changes in global temperature.

El Niño is a periodic weakening—or even a reversal, as is the case with this one—of the easterly trade winds across the tropical Pacific.

Dozens of people made their way toward Oroville Dam to see water surge down the dam’s controlled spillway Thursday.

It’s the first time the spillway has been in opened in five years to maintain storage space in Lake Oroville for flood control. Over the past 10 years, the spillway has been open for flood control just twice. Many people parked their vehicles just off of Oro Dam Boulevard East and got out to see the turbulent water cascade down the long concrete chute away from the earthen dam.

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.