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After months of flagging water conservation, Californians rebounded in March, cutting their urban consumption by 24.3% compared to the same month in 2013.

The savings percentage, announced Tuesday, was more than double the state’s effort in February and offered a strong signal that people in cities and towns remain cognizant of California’s drought, despite a year of average rain that fell mostly in Northern California. The data also appeared to demonstrate that Californians will continue their thrifty water ways even without a mandate to slash usage by 25%.

Scientists in the US have identified the factors that make a tree more likely to perish in a drought, after conducting an exhaustive examination of 33 separate scientific studies of tree mortality involving 475 species and 760,000 individual trees.

The answer they come up with is that the deciding factor is how efficiently trees draw water from the ground to their leaf tips. This is not a surprising conclusion, but scientists don’t trust the obvious: they like to check these things.

 

Nearly 40 years after California began offering inducements to people to heat their shower water using the sun, Brad Heavner of the California Solar Energy Industries Association still has to remind them the technology even exists.

When most people think about solar energy, they think about solar photovoltaic panels that make electricity. “But there’s also solar water heating systems that are very effective at using energy from the sun,” Heavner said. Panels that heat water are not sparkle blue. Instead, they are often a dull black inside. It’s all about absorption. And they are larger than panels for electricity.

Drought-weary Californians breathed a sigh of relief because another “March Miracle” series of storms soaked much of the northern half of the state. Sadly for the people of the Golden State, their relief is mostly misplaced. The state reported that the statewide snowpack is only 87 percent of normal and El Niño was mostly a disappointment. Farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley will receive only 5 percent of their allocation from the Central Valley Project this year. It looks like we are heading into the fifth year of a historic drought.

 

San Diego public utility officials shut off customers’ water with no warning and have no specific policy outlining how to restart service or adjudicate complaints, local consumer advocates say. The city also piles on unnecessary fees and penalties — even adding years-old parking tickets and library fines to the balances due — before agreeing to restore water service, the Utility Consumers’ Action Network says.