California’s drought is so extreme, you can see its effects from space

While Californians on the ground have been suffering through an intense drought over the past year, this is the scene from space.

This image was captured just last month by NASA's Terra satellite and posted on their Earth Observatory page. It shows the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the Coast Range and the Cascade Mountains, in what could be seen as a fairly unremarkable photograph. However, it's when you look at it alongside an image from just one year before, just as the drought was getting started, that the extreme nature of the problem becomes apparent:

I highly recommend checking this out on the NASA Earth Observatory page too, just to get the full effect. Click here and then click on the 'View Image Comparison' button below the two images. By sliding the bar back and forth across the image, you can see just how stark conditions are now, and just how much snow has been lost from the mountains. Worse yet, the amount of snow last year wasn't even a normal amount. It was well below average for that time of year.

Another page on the Earth Observatory site has an image that shows just how badly the vegetation is suffering as well.

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Even last year, there were concerns being expressed during the summer of the loss of the snowpack in the mountains along the west coast of North America, and the effect that this was going to have on the water supply. Come around to now, and just one day before the top image was taken, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency for the state, and at the beginning of February a report was issued that showed that 2013 was the driest year on record for the state of California.

Not only are reservoirs drying up in the U.S.'s most populous state, but with one-third of the drinking water supplied by snow from the mountains, the region is in some pretty dire straits if the weather doesn't improve soon. If the drought continues, there will also likely be more wildfires, water reserves stretched to the limit, with an increased danger of contamination, and even reduced power generated from hydroelectric plants.

Droughts have lasted for longer in California's past, but these extreme events happen only infrequently. With climate change, predictions are that these events will happen more often, so that extreme events that are once-in-a-century now will happen every 50 years, events that happen every 50 years will happen every 20-25 years, and so on. If this is what we're seeing now, after only one year of this drought, we really need to do something to curb our influences on climate change before it's too late.

(Images courtesy: LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC)

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