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Overall water use is climbing in Southern California as parts of the state plunge back into drought, driving state and regional water managers to consider permanently reinstating some watering bans and conservation programs. Gov. Jerry Brown lifted California’s drought emergency status a year ago, after a wet winter that snapped a historic 2013-2017 drought, and the state ended his 25 percent mandatory conservation order.

Amid a winter marked by more sun than storms, California is desperate for rain and snow. An end-of-winter burst of wet potent California storms, aka a Miracle March, is the only hope to bolster the Sierra Nevada snowpack and boost the rainfall totals, but meteorologists say the odds of this happening are almost none. Even if a few wet weather systems sweep across the state in March, they’re unlikely to bump the state up to normal precipitation totals for the season.

Last week, the California Department of Water Resources officially announced it would seek to build a single tunnel, but now the Metropolitan Water Agency of Southern California could change that. The Sacramento Bee reported that Metropolitan, the largest public water agency in the state, was contemplating a plan to fund a significant portion of California WaterFix. It was just a week ago that the state decided to scale back the project – a two-tunnel conveyance with a price tag of $17 billion.

Cloud seeding has become big business worldwide as a means to boost water supplies. Utilities and governments spend tens of millions of dollars on the process, which is especially common in Western states that rely on winter snowpack to meet year-round water demand. The basic process involves spraying silver iodide from a plane as it flies through storm clouds. The silver iodide induces moisture in the cloud to form ice crystals, which then (hopefully) fall out as snow. Some studies have estimated cloud seeding can boost snowfall by between 8 and 15 percent.