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Water takes many forms. Sometimes it hits us as a howling hurricane.
Other times it creeps around as fog. Water might hit us as hail, or it might fall quietly as snow.
All living things on Earth need water. In your lifetime, you will drink about 16,000 gallons of it. Water covers two-thirds of Earth, but most of it is salty ocean water we can’t drink. Only 3 percent is fresh, or nonsalty. And 75 percent of that is in hard-to-reach places, like glaciers and ice caps.
This is why we need precipitation. That’s the rain, snow, and other moisture that come from the atmosphere. About 4.2 trillion gallons of water fall on the U.S. every day. It washes our dishes, powers our showers, and fills up our pools.
