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Water takes many forms. Sometimes it arrives as a howling hurricane, while other times it creeps around as fog.
Water might come pelting down from the sky as hail, or it might drift silently to Earth as snow.
Every living thing on Earth needs water—including you. In your lifetime, you will drink around 16,000 gallons of it. Although two-thirds of the Earth is covered with water, most of it is salty, undrinkable ocean water. Only 3 percent is fresh, or nonsalty, and 75 percent of that water is in remote places, like glaciers and ice caps.
That’s why we need precipitation—the rain, snow, and other types of moisture that come from Earth’s atmosphere. On average, about 4.2 trillion gallons of water fall on the United States every day. That’s what washes our dishes, lets us take showers, and fills our pools.
