Snowpack in the West "isn't just low — it's gone"

An animation of images acquired by NASA's Terra satellite, one on April 27, 2013, and the other from April 29 of this year, when snowpack was less extensive. (Source: NASA Worldview) The quotation in the headline for this post is the assessment of David Garen, a hydrologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. It's a slight exaggeration, as the animation above shows. But not by much. As Garen puts it in a press release issued yesterday by his agency: