Water Cycle And Water Insecurity Flashcards
What is a System?
A system is something made of different components that work together in an interconnected way to perform some function.
Earth is a closed system.
Describe Earth and it’s System
A closed system where only energy can pass into and exit the system.
No water is added or lost to the system.
Describe a Store
Places where water is held.
Describe Flows and Flux
Flows: a process that moves water from one store to another (e.g evaporation)
Flux: we can call a flow a flux if we know the quantity (e.g 160,000 tonnes of water evaporated a year)
Where is water distributed on Earth?
Oceans: 96.5%
Glaciers and Ice caps: 68.7%
Ground-water: 30.1%
(main three)
What is a cryosphere?
Is the frozen water part of the Earth system.
(Permafrost, snow, Ice caps)
What is permafrost?
Frozen ground.
What are proportional flow lines?
The bigger the arrow the bigger the flow.
(On a diagram of the arrow after cycle)
What are residency times?
The average amount of time water is stored in a place.
The longest residency times found in ice caps, glaciers, permafrost.
Shortest residency times in biospheric water.
Longer periods are more vulnerable to pollution.
What does renewable mean?
A water resource is renewable if it is consistently being replenished and isn’t over extracted. No depletion.
Are water supplies non-renewable?
Some stores like water from snow/ice can be seen as non-renewable.
As the store melts as cryospheric losses the source of water disappears too.
This is the case in fossil aquifers where over abstraction outweighs any replenishment.
An example of a fossil aquifer.
Ogollala Aquifer
A drainage basin..
*Is an area of land being drained by a particular river system.
*It looks at a hydrological system at a smaller, regional scale.
What is a watershed?
The boundary that separates one drainage basin from another.
Largest and smallest drainage basin’s.
Amazon= Largest
Indonesia, Tamborasi River= Smallest
What makes one drainage basin different to another?
Climate= precipitation, evaporation, vegetation.
Soils= affect infiltration and percolation.
Relief= rainfall, overland flow.
Vegetation= evapotranspiration
Geology= permeability.
Humans.
Main input in a drainage system is precipitation.
Form: snow, rain, hail.
Amount: total over a year.
Intensity: short sharp bursts, drizzly. (Effects infiltration)
Seasonality: is there a wet/dry season
Distribution: particularly for large drainage basins.
3 main causes of precipitation
Orographic Rainfall
Conventional Rainfall
Frontal Rainfall
What is orographic rainfall?
Caused by the relief of the land forcing water vapour to rise and cool.
What is convectional rainfall?
Caused by the heating of the Earth’s surface leading to more buoyant parcels of humid air rising.
Causes Flashy HYDROGRAPHS
What is frontal rainfall?
Caused by the warmer air masses rising above denser, colder air masses.
Causes a flat HYDROPGRAPH
What is a monsoon climate?
Very wet climate and happen when their is a difference between temperature on land and in the sea.
Can affect precipitation.
What is continentality?
How far inland you are/how far from the sea.
Affect precipitation.
How can humans disrupt the flows and stores within a drainage basin?
Hydroelectric station, over-abstraction, deforestation, arable farming, pasture farming, urbanisation, climate change, reservoirs.
