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A wet start to the rainy season means much of the Bay Area enters winter with well above average rainfall. The National Weather Service released maps on Thursday showing the majority of the Bay Area at over 110 percent of normal for this time of year. Much of Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties have seen over 150 percent of normal, with dotted areas in the state seeing as much as 400 percent of the typical rainfall by December 20th.

 

With the rainy season off to a strong start, California officials on Wednesday more than doubled the amount of water they expect to provide next year from the State Water Project. Officials had been proceeding with caution after five years of drought, projecting last month that the state’s massive network of reservoirs, pumps and pipelines would distribute only 20 percent of the requested water. That estimate was adjusted to 45 percent.

A long-awaited draft environmental review document for California American Water’s Monterey Peninsula desalination project will not be released Wednesday as originally scheduled, and the release of the critical report will be delayed until next month. According to a California Public Utilities Commission statement sent to The Herald on Tuesday, the draft desal project environmental impact report, as well as an environmental impact statement, is still in the works and is now expected to be published in January.

Data and data management are persistent concerns for the Delta and California water more generally. Data Wars: A New Hope, a shadow puppet play on the subject, was shown at the 2016 Bay-Delta Science Conference in Sacramento. The challenge of the Conference’s theme, “Science for Solutions: Linking Data and Decisions,” is illustrated by characters such as a lonesome marsh wren and a striped bass with a Boston accent.