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(Image: NASA)

You can see why California is in trouble. This animated image shows that the Sierra Nevada mountains, which usually supply a third of the state’s water, have only a fraction of the snow that covered them last year. No wonder the drought there is so brutal.

The images were taken by the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. It’s not the first time that Terra has helped California’s authorities cope with an environmental catastrophe – it acted as the eyes of the state’s firefighters during massive wildfires in 2003.