Hydrologic Processes
About Hydrological Processes
Our Earth may seem like it has a lot of water, but how is that water dispersed? Our water mainly comes from the ocean, about 97%, but it's not usable for human necessity. So that leaves us with the remaining 3% to work with. Out of that 3%, 2/3 of it groundwater, so like in wells and all that. The other 1/3 is within our glaciers. Out of the 2/3, the 66%, of water that we CAN use, only 0.03% of that is rivers and lakes.
All water moves through drainage basins: where the water is moving to and from (where it starts and where it ends). A drainage basin is the area that catches the flowing water, such as a dam, a river, or a lake.
There are five processes at work in the hydrologic cycle:
condensation: the process by which water vapor in the air is changed into liquid water; it's the opposite of evaporation
precipitation: water that falls from the atmosphere to the Earth's surface
infiltration: precipitation that soaks into the soil
runoff: precipitation that does not soak into the soil but instead moves on the Earth's surface toward streams
evapotranspiration: the sum of all processes by which water moves from the land surface to the atmosphere via evaporation and transpiration
These occur simultaneously and, except for precipitation, continuously This cycle is also known as the water cycle, but a bit more advanced.
