California will hopefully get slammed with a fair amount of El Niño's wrath of rains this winter. But even a few months of extreme wetness won't end its crushing drought, which has been insidiously parching the state for about four years.
To see the severity of the situation in 2015 alone, check out this graphic The Los Angeles Times Graphics Department released on Dec. 17 below.
You can see how the state has gotten increasingly more thirsty with time over the last year:
The team assembled this and an even larger graphic tracking California's conditions since 2011 by pulling data from the US Drought Monitor, which publishes new maps of dryness across the US every week.
About 80% of the state is severely dehydrated, according to the Los Angeles Times, and is not expected to recuperate any time soon.
In fact, a study published on September 14 in the journal Nature Climate Change laid out a staggering statistic: The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range — which supplies California with more than 60% of its water — is lower than it has ever been in the past 500 years.
To see what that looks like, NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite took this image of the range in March of 2010 and 2015 — a time when the snowpack is usually at its peak.
You can see that the mountain range's reserve of water in the form of snow has diminished dramatically within the past five years:
It will take a long time of wet conditions — more than just one season — for this snow to build up again.
Deeper analysis revealed that in 2015, the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierras contained just 40% as much water (in the form of ice and snow) as it did when the region's snowpack levels were highest in 2014.
This is shocking, considering 2014 was already one of the two driest years in the recorded history of California.
You can also see the dramatic change in the color of the Central Valley of California and the absence snow in the interior of Nevada.
This is very bad news for bone-dry California. Snowfall in the 400-mile long mountain range, which sprawls through central and eastern California and partially extends into Nevada, is critical to California's fresh water supply.
Because the climate west of the Rockies is normally dry, snowfall in the winter supplies those dry regions with water reserves to pull from as the snow melts into basins during the summer and fall seasons.
The greater this snowpack reserve, the more likely California's reservoirs will be filled enough with runoff to meet its water needs in the dry months.
These images, findings, and graphics highlight how severely depleted California's natural water supply is. And with reports that our "climate change hiatus" is officially coming to an end, California will likely be extremely dry for years to come.
