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Freshwater Withdrawn Today
+7.6M per minute · since 00:00 UTC
Estimated, not measured
Most water use is invisible from a tap. Agriculture takes roughly seventy per cent of all freshwater withdrawn, so the biggest lever on water is what we eat, not how long we shower.
Estimated volume of freshwater withdrawn since midnight UTC for agriculture, industry and households.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because every signal advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
The same ~4,000 km³ a year of withdrawals, expressed in cubic metres.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.