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The Santa Ana winds in Southern California sweep down across the deserts and across the Los Angeles Basin.

With climate change continuing to create a myriad of new and uncertain weather and water-related issues, no state in America is better at getting ready for our environmental future than California.

As reported by the Hermosa Beach Patch, a recent study by the National Resources Defense Council found that California is one of only nine states (including Alaska and Wisconsin) that has created strategies to deal with the host of predicted situations like water shortages and droughts.

“Because of the significant risks to the state from increasing temperatures, changes in precipitation, sea level rise, and ocean acidification, California has been one of the leading states in the U.S. on climate change action,” states the report, titled “Ready or Not: An Evaluation of State Climate and Water Preparedness Planning.”

By contrast, as many as 29 states (including Texas and Ohio), have done next to nothing to get ready for potential weather-related climate impacts.

"They are not doing anything to cut down on carbon pollution or to prepare for climate change impacts," Said Ben Chou, a water policy analyst for the NRDC and one of the report’s authors to the San Francisco Chronicle. “On the state level it doesn’t seem like climate change exists to them. It’s not on their radar.”

Of the several California programs that earned the top ranking include the state’s Air Resource Board cap-and-trade program (which looks to reduce greenhouse gases), the California Environmental Quality Act and the Climate Action Team.

"Other states have been proactive on water conservation but they don't require a certain level of water conservation in the future," Chou added to the Chronicle. "That's what California is doing here and it will certainly pay dividends if and when California is impacted by climate change."

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Water quality is serious business in California. In order to keep an even closer eye on what exactly is going in the state’s rivers, a research team from the University of California Berkeley has developed a fleet of aquatic robots known as the Floating Sensor Network that can not only monitor water quality, but also relay the results on Twitter.

As reported by Treehugger, 100 of the robots were released into the Sacramento River earlier this week, in order to measure the salinity, pollution and water flow of the essential Sacramento-San Joaquin water system, responsible for the majority of the state’s drinking water and irrigation supply. The ones outfitted with Android phones along with GPS systems are doing the tweeting.

"This is the way of the future," said Alexandre Bayen, associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley and project supervisor to Techworld. "We're moving from an age when humans were deploying things and baby-sitting them to an age where you just put the robots in the water, they do their job, they come back or they call you if they have a problem."

Follow the tweeting robots: @fsnandroid61.

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Generally, wine and fish can be paired quite nicely. In California wine country, however, the relationship between the two has not been so harmonious. New research has found a correlation between markedly higher death rates in steelhead trout with lowered summer water levels and the amount of vineyard acreage upstream.

The study, conducted by biologists at UC Berkeley, discovered that the fish are especially vulnerable during the drier months of summer. They found only 30 percent of the juvenile trout present in June survived to see the end of the season. The number of surviving fish increases in years with more rainfall and in watersheds with less vineyard activity.

"Nearly all of California's salmon and trout populations are on the path to extinction and if we're going to bring these fish back to healthy levels, we have to change the way we manage our water," said Theodore Grantham, lead author of the study in Science Daily. "Water withdrawals for agricultural uses can reduce or eliminate the limited amount of habitat available to sustain these cold-water fish through the summer. I don't suggest we get rid of vineyards, but we do need to focus our attention on water management strategies that reduce summer water use. I believe we can protect flows for fish and still have our glass of wine."

The myriad uses vineyards have for water (ranging from irrigation to overhead sprinkler systems) are the root of the problem, with Grantham suggesting offstream reservoirs to store water during heavy rainfalls. That way, vineyards wouldn’t have to drain area streams during periods of low flow.

The study was based on nine years of fish count information across nine streams in Sonoma County. 

"This is the first scientific publication on how vineyards and summer stream flows relate to fish survivorship in California's tributary streams," added study principal investigator Adina Merenlender. "These findings will help inform an important environmental issue in California that is disturbing to conservationists and grape growers alike."

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An eye-opening new study by Environment California finds that 2.6 million pounds of toxic chemicals were released into the state’s waterways in 2010. The Santa Monica Bay ranked 2^nd in the state for the most toxic discharge at 750,000 pounds. That number was only surpassed by the San Pablo Bay, which clocked just over 1 million pounds of toxic discharge.

“California’s waterways are a polluter’s paradise right now," said Sean Carroll, a federal field associate with Environment California in the Pacific Palisades Patch. "Polluters dump 2.6 million pounds of toxic chemicals into California’s lakes, rivers and streams every year. We must turn the tide of toxic pollution by restoring Clean Water Act protections to our waterways.”

Among the offending toxins include Arsenic, Mercury and Benzene, which have been linked to cancer, reproductive disorders and other health and developmental issues.

Environment California recommends a three-part plan to help curb toxic discharge, starting with the obvious and reducing the amount generated by the polluting industrial facilities. From there they suggest that President Obama clarify the Clean Water Act, and that the EPA and state agencies set and enforce more stringent limits when issuing permits for such companies.

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The waters of California are swirling. As we reported recently, the controversial Water Reliability Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives, but heavy-hitting senators like Dianne Fienstein and Barbara Boxer are mobilized against it going any further. We also reported on the sobering new report from UC Davis regarding water contamination in California’s farm regions.

Now there’s a new report from Environment California expected tomorrow (which, coincidentally, is World Water Day) that will detail exactly the “total amount of toxic chemicals released by industrial facilities into California’s rivers, lakes, and streams, as ranked by waterway, watershed, type of pollution, polluter, and state.”

As outlined in a press release, this new report will explain the “total figures for direct releases of chemicals that cause cancer, reproductive, and developmental harm.” In short, it’s something that most of us will be eager to see. We will be sure to bring you those figures as they arrive.

In the meantime, TreeHugger is reporting on an inventive new bottle that purifies water in just 60 seconds using UV rays. While the CamelBak All Clear water bottle retails for a cool $99, it looks to be worth the price. Utilizing a UV light in the cap powered on two rechargeable Li-Ion batteries, this bottle purifies any tap, spigot or even stream water with a good, hard shake.

Depending on what that report says tomorrow, the self-purifying water bottle market in general could be on the upswing around here.