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Water takes many forms. Sometimes it arrives as a howling hurricane, while other times it slithers around as fog.
Water might pelt us as hail, or it might fall silently as snow.
All living things on Earth need water. In your lifetime, you will drink around 16,000 gallons of it. Water covers two-thirds of Earth, but most of it is salty, undrinkable ocean water. Only 3 percent is fresh, or nonsalty, and 75 percent of that is in remote places, like glaciers and ice caps.
This is why we need precipitation. That’s the rain, snow, and other types of moisture that come from Earth’s atmosphere. About 4.2 trillion gallons of water fall on the United States every day. It’s what washes our dishes, lets us take showers, and fills up our pools.
