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

Wedged between Arizona and Utah, less than 20 miles up river from the Grand Canyon, a soaring concrete wall nearly the height of two football fields blocks the flow of the Colorado River. There, at Glen Canyon Dam, the river is turned back on itself, drowning more than 200 miles of plasma-red gorges and replacing the Colorado’s free-spirited rapids with an immense lake of flat, still water called Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reserve.

If item number one on your summer to-do list is to witness the booming waterfalls of Yosemite National Park, you’re in for a treat. Water levels appear to have rebounded from four years of drought and we’re now in a window of peak waterfall conditions.

United States Geological Survey numbers indicate water under the Pohono Bridge at the west end of the Yosemite Valley has been climbing, and reaching heights not seen since 2012.

I want to be absolutely clear that whatever it takes, we cannot allow the twin tunnels to ever be built. Sized for a capacity of 15,000 cubic feet per second, they are capable of taking all the water that flows down the Sacramento River for half of every year. The tunnels are the ultimate vampire capable of sucking the Delta dry.

We must stop the tunnels, but that is not enough. We must conserve water on farms and in cities. We must replenish our aquifers and build new off-stream reservoirs like Sites north of Sacramento and Los Vaqueros near Brentwood.

In another sign of the warming climate, key species of trees in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range — including lodge pole pine, red fir and western white pine — are shifting to higher elevations in search of cooler temperatures, a broad new study by state biologists has found.

Think the current California drought has been tough? It will get worse in the future, because the state is always growing. But quantifying that effect has largely been guesswork. Until now.

A new study in Environmental Research Letters by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Nature Conservancy estimates how water demand will change in 2062 by projecting the present rate of land-use change. This includes urban growth and farmland conversion – both conversion of farms into urban areas and conversion of annual crops to permanent crops, like orchards and vineyards.