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House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced a deal to include a long-stalled drought measure inside a water projects bill that is poised to clear Congress as early as this week.

But at least one top Democrat in the Senate says she will try to block passage. The deal, which is aimed at bringing water to drought-stricken areas of California, came after negotiations with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., McCarthy said. Feinstein has in the past opposed the drought bill.

Based on data from the NWS Climate Prediction Center, temperatures across much of the northwest US, from Alaska all the way down to northern California and the Four Corner states will be below the normal mean values (reference period 1981-2010) during the first half of the month. The highest probability of below normal temperatures occurring extends along the northern Rockies and is mainly related to the invasion of very cold Arctic air across northwest Canada into the northwest US.

California is finally embracing its rivers. It may be a choking embrace. We Californians have long celebrated our coastal splendor and beautiful mountains. But our rivers were seen as mere plumbing for our hydration convenience. Now California’s communities, seeking space for environmental restoration and recreation (and some desperately needed housing), are treating rivers and riverfronts as new frontiers and busily reconsidering how these bodies of water might better connect people and places.

Californians hear a lot about the lessons they can learn from other areas that have coped with water scarcity, like Israel’s development of desalination or how Australia handled its Millennial Drought, which lasted more than a decade. But not all water issues come down to scarcity. And that’s why looking north to Canada could also provide some inspiration when it comes to technologies to treat water (and ways to save energy in the process), tools for finding and fixing leaks, faster processes for testing water and software for analyzing important water data.

A temporary truce has been called today in an ongoing dispute between Kern County, Bakersfield and the Kern Delta Water District. Six months ago, the city and KDWD announced that they were forming the Kern River Groundwater Sustainability Agency. Afterwards the county filed its own GSA application with the state in order to protect its policing and land use powers. California law says that if competing GSA organizations fail to resolve their differences, the state may come in and take over the use and management of ground water resources.