The Water Cycle

Run and get a glass of water and put it on the table next to you. Take a good long look at the water. Now -- can you guess how old it is?

The water in your glass may have fallen from the sky as rain just last week, but the water itself ha earth has!

The earth has a limited amount of water. That water keeps going around and around and around and around and (well, you get the idea) in what we call the "Water Cycle". This cycle is made up of a few main parts:

evaporation (and transpiration) condensation precipitation collection

Evaporation:

Evaporation is when the sun heats up water in rivers or lakes or the ocean and turns it into vapor o steam. The water vapor or steam leaves the river, lake or ocean and goes into the air.

Do plants sweat? Well, sort of.... people perspire (sweat) and plants transpire. Transpiration is the process by which plants lose water out of their leaves. Transpiration gives evaporation a bit of a hand in getting the water vapor back up into the air.

Condensation: Water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into liquid, forming clouds. This is called condensation. You can see the same sort of thing at home... pour a glass of cold water on a hot day and watch what happens. Water forms on the outside of the glass. That water didn't somehow leak through the glass! It actually came from the air. Water vapor in the warm air, turns back into liquid when it touches the cold glass.

Precipitation: Precipitation occurs when so much water has condensed that the air cannot hold it anymore. The clouds get heavy and water falls back to the earth in the form of rain, hail, sleet or snow.

Collection: When water falls back to earth as precipitation, it may fall back in the oceans, lakes or rivers or it may end up on land. When it ends up on land, it will either soak into the earth and become part of the ground water that plants and animals use to drink or it may run over the soil and collect in the oceans, lakes or rivers where the cycle starts

all over again.

The hydrologic cycle keeps water constantly circulating on the Earth.

The Cycle of Rain

Water plays a major role in weather, despite making up such a small fraction of the atmosphere. In some areas, the local atmosphere may contain as much as 4 percent water, while other regions have no atmospheric water at all. As water can exist as a solid, liquid or gas under normal atmospheric conditions, it participates in thehydrologic cycle. In this cycle, water evaporates from the ocean in the form of water vapor and eventually returns to land and sea in the form of precipitation. You can't see water vapor, but it quickly becomes visible when it cools and condenses against something. If you've ever noticed moisture beads on the windows of a warm car on a cold day, you've seen condensation in action. Warm air vapor touches the cold window and the vapor turns back to a liquid. Clouds form along similar lines. The atmosphere is full of tiny dust particles called condensation nuclei, which come from volcanic eruptions, dust storms, fires and pollution. When water vapor condenses, it clings to these microscopic specks. If there's enough cooling water vapor in the air, these accumulate by the trillions to form clouds. If temperatures are cold enough, the water turns to ice around the condensation nuclei. For a more in-depth look at clouds, read How Clouds Work. In a windless world, these water droplets would descend right back down to the surface, but Earth'scomplex upper air winds keep the clouds afloat, moving them across vast distances and altering their shape in the process. If too much water condenses around a particle or if the air temperature drops, the water will fall back to the surface. Liquid particles fall in the form of rain, while frozen particles fall as snow. If the rain freezes as it falls, it becomes freezing rain. In some cases, rain ascends to higher, chilly altitudes by an updraft; the particles freeze, then return to Earth in the form of a hailstone. Clouds come in various shapes and sizes and occur at varying altitudes. They can even gather on the ground in the form of fog. This occurs when warm, moist air close to the ground either cools rapidly or becomes oversaturated with water vapor.

But as you know, Earth's most substantial cloud formations occur in the air. On the next page, we'll look at how all that water vapor gets up so high.