This year's historic drought that devastated California and much of the West is now visible from space, Yahoo News reported.
Effects of the extreme drought on vegetation is evident in an image taken by NASA's Terra satellite on Feb. 16. The image shows shades of brown where green should be, and shades of green where the Earth should be blanketed in white.
"In a normal year, much of the green areas near the mountains would be snow-covered," Ramakrishna Nemani, a vegetation sensing expert at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a blog post. "Since there is not much snow this year, the evergreen vegetation appears anomalously green. In fact, that is bad news for this time of the year."
Indeed, the coastal mountains stretching from Northern California on south are bone dry, the NASA blog said.
Indicating some farms that still have access to water for irrigation, there are a few patches of green in the midst of California's Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. But much of the region is brown - signs of land suffering from drought stress or left fallow when it would normally be planted with crops, Yahoo News reported.
"If you showed me this image without the date, I would say: 'This is California in early fall after a long, hot summer, before the fall and winter rains and snows arrived,'" Bill Patzert, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. "This is no California winter postcard."
But it's not just a winter drought.
"The last 12 months have been the driest since at least 1885, NASA said," according to Yahoo News. "From Feb. 1, 2013, through Jan. 31, 2014, the state received an average of 6.97 inches of rain, or roughly 15 inches below the normal 22.51."
With 70 percent of California in extreme or exceptional drought, 95 percent of the state is experiencing drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
The drought-stricken state was toured by President Obama last week, Yahoo News reported.
"We can't think of this simply as a zero-sum game. It can't just be a matter of, 'there's going to be less and less water so I'm going to grab more and more of a shrinking share of water,' " Obama said while announcing $160 million in federal aid. "We're going to have to stop looking at these disasters as something to wait for. We have to be clear. A changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods are potentially going to be costlier and they're going to be harsher."
