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Winter is off to an alarmingly dry start across the Colorado River Basin, but you wouldn’t know it from the latest federal projections for Lake Mead. A monthly report by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation offers a slightly sunnier outlook for the reservoir than the agency had predicted in December, though both projections say the lake east of Las Vegas will finish the year about 5 feet lower than it is now.

One of Jerry Brown’s biggest failures as governor has been his stubborn, foolhardy approach to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta that provides a portion of the drinking water for 25 million Californians, including more than 5 million South Bay and East Bay residents. The news Friday that the Brown administration is reportedly scaling back his $17 billion, twin-tunnel plan to a single tunnel at slightly more than half the cost is a relief for Northern Californians fearing a massive Southern California water grab at the expense of the health of the Delta.

The millions of trees that died in the Sierra Nevada during California’s five-year drought may have actually helped the state’s water supply once the historic dry spell finally ended, according to a new study. Scientists led by UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute examined how much water was being absorbed by plant life in 1 million acres of Sierra forest along the watershed that feeds into the Kings River east of Fresno. The study, published Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, spanned the years before, during and after the drought, which officially ended last year.