Now you see it, now you don't

 

Because of California's extremely dry conditions, the Sacramento Valley's big "atmospheric river" storm of Feb. 8-9 didn't make much of a dent in the state's water deficit. Valley rivers shrank as soon as they swelled, as you see in this chronological photo series of the Consumes River south of Sacramento. 

The stormwater saturated the bone-dry ground near the surface in a matter of hours then ran amok down the rivers. Carson Jeffres, field and lab director at the Center for Watershed Sciences, captured the dramatic changes on his smartphone camera. "The (Cosumnes) went from dry to out in the floodplain in about 16 hours," Jeffres told KQED reporter Craig Miller. [STORY]

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