Water Cycle

Welcome to Viva's lifestyle. This video is about the water cycle. The water cycle is also known as hydrological or hydrologic cycle.

Earth's mass remains constant, but the water percentage changes depending on the season.

The water cycle consists mainly of three steps, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Other sub-movements of water are snow melting, percolation, and transpiration.

In the water cycle, the water moves in different phases like liquid, snow, and vapor form continuously from the Earth to the cloud and again back to the Earth. Let's understand evaporation, condensation, and precipitation step by step.

Sun and sunlight play a big role in the water cycle. Sun temperature heats the earth's water sources such as oceans, rivers, lakes, etc. The energy emitted by the Sun increases the water temperature in oceans, rivers, and lakes.

This increased water surface temperature generates water vapor. As water molecules' mass is less than other atmosphere components such as oxygen and nitrogen hence water vapor is less dense.

Due to less density and due to atmospheric airflow, water vapor moves into the air.

With increased altitude, both temperature and pressure decrease which leads to water vapor transformation in water droplets. This phase is called condensation.

Let's take a close look. Millions of tiny water droplets accumulate in a large area and form clouds due to drops in atmospheric pressure and temperature.

Condensation can also occur at low heights or ground level too, this is known as a fog.

In the condensation phase, the water vapor can also be transferred into solid ice due to low temperature.

Dust, dirt, tiny particles, and volcano ash promote condensation by providing a surface to tiny water droplets.

As the tiny droplet formulation continues it becomes heavy and starts dropping off toward the ground due to gravity.

This process is called precipitation. In the precipitation phase, the water droplets or ice crystals fall back to the earth.

In most cases, the precipitation starts with falling ice crystals or snowflakes from the cloud. But as the temperature towards the earth's surface increases, ice crystal transforms into raindrops.

See the timelapse video of the rain. This is the exact way, the precipitation happens and we call it as it's raining.

The clouds migrate from one location to another location due to flowing atmospheric wind.

In most cases, mountain areas always have more rainfall compared to flat landscapes due to orographic precipitation.

Orographic precipitation happens due to mountain slopes and terrain. Orographic lift forces clouds to settle and further enhances the cooling effect. This forces water vapor to form clouds surrounding mountains and precipitate. This is known as orographic precipitation. Just the same, as what you are watching on the screen right now.

Extensive cloud formation surrounding mountains results in heavy rainfall in the mountains. The rainwater further flows downstream and forms a river or waterfall. This phenomenon is called a surface runoff.

Several surface runoff joins and forms a river. The river water further flows downstream and flows into the ocean.

Around 70 to 80% of global precipitation occurs over the ocean. More than 80% of global evaporation occurs from the ocean. That's the reason, the ocean plays a big role in the water cycle.

This water cycle is a biogeochemical cycle. The water cycle will keep occurring for billions of years as long as Earth rotates around its axis at 23.5 degrees centigrade and orbits around the sun.

Yeah, you heard it right. Earth's rotation around it is tilted by 23.5 degrees centigrade. This tilted axis generates seasons on the earth.

We hope you learned about the water cycle.

Thank you so much for watching this video.

Please like, share, and subscribe.

#water #rain #summer #watercycle #raining #clouds #wheather #condensation #precipitation #evaporation