"State workers performed a California winter ritual Thursday, poking hollow aluminum tubes into Sierra Nevada meadows to measure the snowpack. In what scientists see as a harbinger, they didn't find much.

'We will conceivably see more years like this in the future,' said geologist Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

As the climate warms in coming decades, scientists say, the state's mountain snowpack could shrink by a third. By the end of the century, more than half of what functions as a huge natural reservoir could disappear."

Bettina Boxall reports for the Los Angeles Times January 29, 2015. [2]