The water cycle

Question 1

How much water does the hydrosphere contain?

Answer 1

1.4 sextillion litres of water

Question 2

What is the type of water in the hydrosphere?

Answer 2

Most is saline in the oceans and less than 3% is freshwater.

Question 3

Where is fresh water stored?

Answer 3

• 69% is frozen in the cyrosphere
• 30% is in groundwater
• 0.3% is liquid freshwater on the earths surface
• 0.04% is water vapour in the atmosphere

Question 4

What must water be for humans to access it?

Answer 4

Must be physically and economically accessible for humans to use it.

Question 5

How can water change?

Answer 5

Can change between solid, liquid and gas and for water to boil or melt it has to gain energy but for water to freeze or condense it has to lose energy.

Question 6

What happens in the global hydrological system?

Answer 6

Water is cycled between different stores.

Question 7

What type of system is the global hydrological system?

Answer 7

A closed system as there are no inputs or outputs of water.

Question 8

How does the amount of water in a store vary?

Answer 8

Varies over a scale of local to global

Question 9

What does the magnitude of a store depend on?

Answer 9

The amount of water flowing through them.

Question 10

Where do different flows occur?

Answer 10

Occur at a range of temporal and spatial time scales.

Question 11

When does evapouration happen?

Answer 11

When liquid water changes to a gas becoming water vapour and gains energy from solar radiation.

Question 12

What does evapouration do?

Answer 12

Increases the amount of water stored in the atmosphere.

Question 13

How does magnitude vary in evapouration?

Answer 13

Varies by location and season as if there is a lot of solar radiation, a large supply of water and warm, dry air evapouration increases.

Question 14

What happens if there isn’t a lot of solar radiation with evapouration?

Answer 14

If there is little solar radiation, little available water and cool air that is nearly saturated evapouration will be low.

Question 15

When does condensation occur?

Answer 15

When water vapour becomes a liquid and loses energy to the surrondings and happens when air containing water vapour cools to it’s dew point.

Question 16

What happens with the water vapour droplets?

Answer 16

They can stay in the atmosphere or flow into other subsystems.

Question 17

What the magnitude of condensation depend on?

Answer 17

Depends on the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere and the temperature as if there is plenty of water vapour in the atmosphere and a drop in temperatures then condensation increases.

Question 18

What is precipitation?

Answer 18

The main flow of water from the atmosphere to the ground.

Question 19

When do clouds form?

Answer 19

When warm air cools down causing water vapour to condense to water droplets which gather as clouds and when the droplets get big enough they fall as precipitation.

Question 20

How do other air masses lead to preciptation?

Answer 20

Warm air is less dense then cool air so when the warm air meets the cool air the warm air is forced above the cool air and as it rises it cools which results in frontal precipitation.

Question 21

How does topography lead to precipitaion?

Answer 21

When warm air meets mountains it is forced to rise which means it cools which leads to orographic precipitation.

Question 22

How does convection lead to precipitation?

Answer 22

When the sun heats up the ground the moisture on the ground evapourates and rises into warm air and as it gets higher it cools which leads to conective precipitation.

Question 23

What happens when water droplets are too small?

Answer 23

They are too small to form clouds on their own so there has to be other tiny particles of substances to act as coud condensation nuclei as they give nuclei a surface to condense on which encourages cloluds to form rather than allowing the moist air to dispense.

Question 24

How does cloud formation and precipitation vary?

Answer 24

Varies seasonally and location.

Question 25

What do cyrospheric processes change?

Answer 25

These processes like accumulation and ablation change the amount of water stored as ice.

Question 26

How does the balance of cyrospheric processes vary?

Answer 26

Varies with temperatures.

Question 27

What happens during period of cold to the cyrosphere?

Answer 27

Inputs are greater than outputs as water is transferred when it snows and less water is transferred away due to melting.

Question 28

What happens during warmer periods to the cyrosphere?

Answer 28

The magnitude of the store reduces due to melting is the biggest output.`

Question 29

Where is there a lot of ice?

Answer 29

• Antaratica
• Greenland
• Artic
• Alpine glaciers

Question 30

How do variations happen?

Answer 30

Happen over different time scales and changes in global temperatures that occur over shorter timescales and annual temperature fluctuations mean snow falls more or less during one period.