As of two days ago, Harvey had dumped around 9 trillion gallons of water.  By yesterday, that number was up to 19 trillion gallons.  And the number is expected to get as high as 25 trillion gallons.

25 Trillion!  That’s 25,000,000,000,000.  Gallons of water.  Here is what 1 gallon of water looks like.

Now take a million of these and dump them from the sky.  Then do THAT 25 million more times.  It’s truly staggering.  It’s literally like a lake of water.

For comparison, I’ve scraped the largest lakes in the US  by volume from wikipedia and visualized them below.  The data from wikipedia is in cubic kilometers, so I converted 25 trillion gallons to about 94.6 cubic kilometers.

Here is Harvey’s output compared to the Great Lakes.  Not that impressive, but the Great Lakes are absolutely massive.  (I can see Lake Michigan out my office window and it basically looks like an ocean.)

If we look at some smaller lakes, this starts to get outrageous.  25 trillion gallons of water is more than Lake Pend Oreille, Becharof Lake, and the Great Salt Lake.  Like WAY more than the Great Salt Lake.  Like almost 5 Great Salt Lakes!  (Can that even be right?  That must be a mistake.)

Here is how to donate to help the people of Houston (and avoid scams).

Cheers.

(My code to make this images is here.)