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In a controversial move, a piece of San Joaquin Valley may end up belonging to Southern California as part of the Delta tunnels project.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California voted to buy five islands that could potentially influence the state’s water supply. The district says it wants to buy Bouldin Island, Bacon Island, Webb Tract most of Holland Tract and the western tip of Chipps Island to preserve quality water.

There’s no other way to say it. The federal Bureau of Reclamation’s decision Wednesday to export less water south from the Delta than is legally allowed defies common sense.

Rain and snow finally have returned to California following three years of intense drought. This most recent storm was big enough to inflict damage on coastal areas and bury the northern Sierra under deep blankets of snow.

Over the past week, Northern and Central California received two to three times as much rain as it usually does up to this point in the month. As much as five feet of snow fell across the peaks of the Sierra Mountains. Round two of what Californians are calling “Miracle March” begins Thursday.

An atmospheric river of moisture over the Pacific Ocean has been pointed like a fire hose at the West Coast since last week. The plume spans over 2,000 miles across the Pacific, and gets its nickname “the pineapple express” from its origin around Hawaii.

When experts predicted in 2014 and into 2015 the impending arrival of a major El Niño event for 2015-2016, Californians breathed a collective sigh of relief. The phenomenon marked by warm Pacific Ocean temperatures was predicted to bring substantial amounts of precipitation, which has been sorely lacking over a dramatic four-year drought in the state. However, the latest updates on precipitation and snowpack shows a mixed bag in California, highlighting that with El Niño, prediction is a tricky business.

Saline groundwater from coastal aquifers is a better alternative water source than seawater for reverse osmosis (RO) desalination due to reduced membrane fouling and pre-treatment costs, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have found.

The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology and conducted by Researchers at the BGU Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, the BGU Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences and the Israel Geological Survey.