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Only three

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percent of water on Earth resides as freshwater. And only a tiny fraction

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of that is actually accessible to us on the surface.
Seven billion of us live on the

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planet. We all have to drink water to live. Where's the water that we drink come from?

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By and large: precipitation.
Music

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GPM is an international satellite mission, providing

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a new generation of observations of rain and snow in all parts of the world,

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every three hours.
If you have good precipitation

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information you can do a very good job characterizing drought, and often

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its subsequent impact on agricultural productivity. There's about

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one major flood a day, someplace in the world.

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So it's not as if it's a rare event.
Understanding how much snow is

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falling is important for transportation, safety, how much

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freshwater falls and is stored in snowpacks. What we really need to

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focus on is all the phases of precipitation so that

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we know what the global picture of where freshwater exists

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in the Earth system.
[ Rain falling, music ]

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[ Rain falling, music ]

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