You are now in California and the U.S. category.

With California’s surface drought over, the state can prioritize investing in groundwater recharge and floodplain restoration to help fight one of its biggest lingering problems: groundwater overdraft. As it does so, the relatively unknown Cosumnes River watershed has emerged as a model. Roughly half of the groundwater basins in California’s Central Valley are critically overdrafted, including the San Joaquin Valley basin to the south of the Cosumnes.

A coalition of environmental groups that had warned Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway was fatally flawed long before it nearly washed away this winter is demanding that federal regulators open up dam repair plans for public vetting. In a filing Wednesday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a coalition of environmental groups led by Sacramento-based Friends of the River also said it was concerned that the state Department of Water Resources is only going part way in repairing the emergency spillway.

Fresh on the heels of a boost to 100 percent for federal water contractors south-of-the-Delta, California water managers upped their initial allocation to full allotments for northern California users and 85 percent for those south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta . Acting California Department of Water Resources (DWR) Director William Croyle hopes to boost the south-of-Delta allocation as the state continues to monitor hydrologic conditions, which have never been wetter in California’s recorded history.