GEOL 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Groundwater Recharge, Surface Runoff, Water Cycle

• School: University of Georgia
• Department: Geology
• Course: GEOL 1120
• Professor: Roden

Document Summary

Lab 04: water cycle, drinking water, porosity, and viscosity. Water is key to life and habitability, acting to facilitate chemical reactions, transport nutrients and waste, and regulate temperature. As such, the process by which water migrates through different reservoirs and the residence time spent in those reservoirs is important to understand a process known as the water cycle. Reservoirs are simply systems/regimes in which water is stored, such as oceans, atmosphere, lakes, glaciers, etc. Residence time is the average time a water molecule will spend in a specific reservoir. The water cycle describes the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the surface of the earth and is distributed throughout ice, fresh water, saline water and atmospheric water. Water transportation in the water cycle are traditionally characterized by the following five processes: evaporation: water on earth"s surface moves to the atmosphere through evaporation and accounts for 90% of the atmospheric water (10% is from evapotranspiration).