CEE 1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Water Cycle, Laminar Flow, Turbulence

• School: University of Iowa
• Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Course: CEE 1030
• Professor: Mary Kosloski

Document Summary

Major takeaways: streams work as networks to move water and sediment, and to weather and erode the material that they flow over, streams have shapes that evolve and change through time, floods happen when streams overflow their channels. Only 2-3% of water on earth is fresh water! 70% of this freshwater is ice, and ~30% is groundwater. If we look at the hydrologic cycle, we can see that water moves between a number of reservoirs. The hydrologic cycle is: the continuous circulation of earth"s water among the oceans, atmosphere and continents. Running water is the most important erosional agent affecting earth"s surface! This produces our dramatic landscapes, and can be quite a hazard. At the scale of the earth, we consider the water cycle a closed system. What we are going to focus on when discussing the hydrosphere this week will be the major freshwater reservoirs (we will consider rivers and groundwater) and also one major water issue: floods.