Only three percent of water on Earth resides as freshwater. And only a tiny fraction of that is actually accessible to us on the surface.

Seven billion of us live on the planet. We all have to drink water to live. Where's the water that we drink come from? By and large: precipitation.

Music

GPM is an international satellite mission, providing a new generation of observations of rain and snow in all parts of the world, every three hours.

If you have good precipitation information you can do a very good job characterizing drought, and often its subsequent impact on agricultural productivity.

There's about one major flood a day, someplace in the world. So it's not as if it's a rare event.

Understanding how much snow is falling is important for transportation, safety, how much freshwater falls and is stored in snowpacks. What we really need to focus on is all the phases of precipitation so that we know what the global picture of where freshwater exists in the Earth system.

Rain falling, music.