Watch the West's Snowpack Shrink Dramatically Right Before Your Eyes in Striking Satellite Image Animations

Before and after satellite images — one pair in natural color and the other in false color — show dramatic shrinkage in snowpack across a large portion of the Western United States centered on Colorado and Utah. In the false color views, snow appears in reddish tones. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animations: Tom Yulsman) On March 18th, I posted a story about the other big drought story you need to pay attention to — not the one in California, which has been garnering most of the headlines but the one that has been afflicting the Colorado River Basin. Since then, I've been keeping an eye on how our snowpack has been doing. And now, at the end of the month, I'm sorry to report that it's not doing well at all. The main culprit: High temperatures — outrageously so in some areas — have been causing premature melting of high mountain snows and early runoff. I made the animation above to illustrate what's happening. It consists of two pairs of images from NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The view stretches from the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains on the right to the Utah-Nevada border on the left. (Also included are snippets of Wyoming to the north and New Mexico and Arizona to the south.) I've chosen both natural and false color images to illustrate what has happened. In both pairs, the first image was acquired on March 5th, and the second on March 30. In the false color images, the reddish tones are indicative of snow. In both cases, the shrinkage of the West's snowpack is stunning. And just for the record, our eyes are not fooling us. Some of the biggest declines have occurred in Colorado's San Juan mountains, in the southwestern corner of the state. Here's the data illustrating what has happened there: