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Principles of Environmental Science7th EditionMary Cunningham, William Cunningham 221 solutions • Water Science School HOME • Water Basics topics • The Water Cycle • Water cycle components » Atmosphere · Condensation · Evaporation · Evapotranspiration · Freshwater lakes and rivers · Groundwater flow · Groundwater storage · Ice and snow · Infiltration · Oceans · Precipitation · Snowmelt · Springs · Streamflow · Sublimation · Surface runoff Precipitation and the Water CyclePrecipitation is water released from clouds in the form of rain, freezing rain, sleet, snow, or hail. It is the primary connection in the water cycle that provides for the delivery of atmospheric water to the Earth. Most precipitation falls as rain. How do raindrops form?A localized heavy summer rainstorm in Colorado, USA.Credit: Howard Perlman, USGS The clouds floating overhead contain water vapor and cloud droplets, which are small drops of condensed water. These droplets are way too small to fall as precipitation, but they are large enough to form visible clouds. Water is continually evaporating and condensing in the sky. If you look closely at a cloud you can see some parts disappearing (evaporating) while other parts are growing (condensation). Most of the condensed water in clouds does not fall as precipitation because their fall speed is not large enough to overcome updrafts which support the clouds. For precipitation to happen, first tiny water droplets must condense on even tinier dust, salt, or smoke particles, which act as a nucleus. Water droplets may grow as a result of additional condensation of water vapor when the particles collide. If enough collisions occur to produce a droplet with a fall velocity which exceeds the cloud updraft speed, then it will fall out of the cloud as precipitation. This is not a trivial task since millions of cloud droplets are required to produce a single raindrop. A more efficient mechanism (known as the Bergeron-Findeisen process) for producing a precipitation-sized drop is through a process which leads to the rapid growth of ice crystals at the expense of the water vapor present in a cloud. These crystals may fall as snow, or melt and fall as rain. How much water falls during a storm You might be surprised at the number of gallons of water that fall from the sky in even a small but intense storm. One inch of rain falling on just a single acre results in 27,154 gallons of water on the landscape. If you'd like to know how much water falls during a storm, use our Interactive Rainfall Calculator (English units or Metric units) to find out - you just enter an area size and rainfall amount and see how many gallons of water reach the ground. What do raindrops look like?Let me introduce myself - I'm Drippy, the (un)official USGS water-science icon! It's obvious that I'm a raindrop, right? After all, all of you know that raindrops are shaped, well ... like me. As proof, you've probably seen me on television, in magazines, and in artists' representations. Truth is, I'm actually shaped more like a drip falling from a water faucet than a raindrop. The common raindrop is actually shaped more like a hamburger bun! As Alistair Frasier explains on his web page, Bad Rain, small raindrops, those with a radius of less than 1 millimeter (mm), are spherical, like a round ball. As droplets collide and grow in size, the bottom of the drop begins to be affected by the resistance of the air it is falling through. The bottom of the drop starts to flatten out until at about 2-3 mm in diameter the bottom is quite flat with an indention in the middle - much like a hamburger bun. Raindrops don't stop growing at 3 millimeters, though, and when they reach about 4-5 mm, things really fall apart. At this size, the indentation in the bottom greatly expands forming something like a parachute. The parachute doesn't last long, though, and the large drop breaks up into smaller drops. Precipitation rates vary geographically and over timePrecipitation does not fall in the same amounts throughout the world, in a country, or even in a city. Here in Georgia, USA, it rains fairly evenly all during the year, around 40-50 inches (102-127 centimeters (cm)) per year. Summer thunderstorms may deliver an inch or more of rain on one suburb while leaving another area dry a few miles away. But, the rain amount that Georgia gets in one month is often more than Las Vegas, Nevada observes all year. The world's record for average-annual rainfall belongs to Mawsynram in Meghalaya State, India, where it averages about 467.4 inches (1,187.2 cm) per year. Contrast this excessive precipitation to Arica, Chile, where no rain fell for 14 years, and in Bagdad, California, where precipitation was absent for 767 consecutive days from October 1912 to November 1914. The map below shows average annual precipitation, in millimeters and inches, for the world. The light green areas can be considered "deserts". You might expect the Sahara area in Africa to be a desert, but did you think that much of Greenland and Antarctica are deserts? Generalized map of global precipitation.Credit: Earth Forum, Houston Museum of Natural Science On average, the 48 continental United States receives enough precipitation in one year to cover the land to a depth of 30 inches (0.76 meters). Precipitation size and speedHave you ever watched a raindrop hit the ground during a large rainstorm and wondered how big the drop is and how fast it is falling? Or maybe you've wondered how small fog particles are and how they manage to float in the air. The table below shows the size, velocity of fall, and the density of particles (number of drops per square foot/square meter of air) for various types of precipitation, from fog to a cloudburst.
Source: Lull, H.W., 1959, Soil Compaction on Forest and Range Lands, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forestry Service, Misc. Publication No.768 Sources and more information
Which is the process by which precipitation that reaches Earth's surface penetrates the soil?1. Some of the water that falls on land soaks into the ground. Water penetrates the ground through joints or small pore spaces between particles via a process known as infiltration.
Which is the largest practical potential source of fresh water in North America?Cards
What is not considered precipitation in all climates?Precipitation occurs when a portion of the atmosphere becomes saturated with water vapor (reaching 100% relative humidity), so that the water condenses and "precipitates" or falls. Thus, fog and mist are not precipitation but colloids, because the water vapor does not condense sufficiently to precipitate.
Which is a water bearing rock stratum?aquifer, in hydrology, rock layer that contains water and releases it in appreciable amounts. The rock contains water-filled pore spaces, and, when the spaces are connected, the water is able to flow through the matrix of the rock. An aquifer also may be called a water-bearing stratum, lens, or zone.
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Which of the following is true of precipitation in North America
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