Dramatic NASA satellite photos show severity of California’s drought
LOS ANGELES — As the West descends deeper into drought, climate and water experts are growing increasingly alarmed by California’s severely shriveling reservoirs.
Shasta Lake — the largest reservoir in the state — held a scant 1.57 million acre-feet of water, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, or about 35% of its capacity on Monday.
A series of satellite images captured by NASA show just how dramatically the water level has fallen.
One image from July 2019 shows a fuller Shasta Lake surrounded by green banks. This year, that greenness has been replaced by a tan “bathtub ring” lining the lakebed, indicating the degree to which water has fallen.
A similar pattern can be seen in images of Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir — which also has experienced a precipitous drop in its reserves — and in the Sierra, which have seen a diminishing snowpack this year.
Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, said “everybody should be concerned” by what they’re seeing.
“The reservoir levels we’re looking at are near-record low, with all the prospects that they will actually be record low by the end of the summer,” he said. “The mountains are dried out. The sponge is completely dry.”
The satellite images are stark, and their ramifications run deep, experts said — from dead lawns and fallow fields to ecological peril and worsening wildfires. Some said they probably represent a new normal for a Golden State gone brown.
Many scientists studying California’s drought point to 1976-77 as a “worst-case scenario” benchmark. That drought brought Lake Oroville to its all-time record low of 646 feet above sea level.
On Monday, the lake sat just over 661 feet above sea level, or 28% of its total capacity, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
As with Lake Shasta, the satellite images of Oroville in 2019 show a lake with a lot more water
than in 2021. And at eye level today, houseboats now sit on cinder blocks because there is not enough water to hold them.
The lake’s water level probably will keep dwindling, said John Yarbrough, the Department of Water Resources’ assistant deputy director of the State Water Project.
Yarbrough said California typically receives the majority of its annual precipitation between early December and the end of March, so the situation is unlikely to improve for several months, if not longer.
“This lack of stored water as a result of the West-wide drought has multiple cascading impacts,” he said, “including dramatically less water for our farms and communities, more stress on our electricity grid and increased wildfire risk.”
Already, farmers in the state have faced such dry conditions that many have begun fallowing fields, pulling out vines and trees, and leaving empty land that once flourished.
Though the ‘76-77 drought was record-setting, there are several key differences that make today more challenging than even that era, said Forrest Melton, senior research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center.
In 1977, California was cooler than it is now, Melton said, and the state was home to about 15 million fewer people. Warming temperatures and a growing population have only driven up use of resources and the demand for reliable water.
“Increasingly, our dry years are also hot years,” Melton said, and “the increase in population in California adds to the challenge for water resource managers, who have to respond to both drought-related reductions to water supplies and continuing growth in demand for water.”