Monday, February 5, 2018

THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE - The sun causes evaporation of water on the surface of the ocean. The water vapor rises and condenses into tiny droplets which cling to dust particles. These droplets form clouds. Water vapor usually remains in the atmosphere for a short time, from a few hours to a few days until it turns into precipitation and falls to the earth as rain, snow, sleet, or hail.


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The Hydrologic Cycle
Water Moves From Land and Ice to Ocean to Atmosphere in the Hydrologic Cycle
By Matt Rosenberg
The hydrologic cycle is the process, powered by the sun's energy, which moves water between the oceans, the sky and the land.
We can start our examination of the hydrologic cycle with the oceans, which hold over 97% of the planet's water.
The sun causes evaporation of water on the surface of the ocean.
The water vapor rises and condenses into tiny droplets which cling to dust particles. These droplets form clouds.
Water vapor usually remains in the atmosphere for a short time, from a few hours to a few days until it turns into precipitation and falls to the earth as rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
Some precipitation falls onto the land and is absorbed (infiltration) or becomes surface runoff which gradually flows into gullies, streams, lakes, or rivers.
Water in streams and rivers flows to the ocean, seeps into the ground, or evaporates back into the atmosphere.
Water in the soil can be absorbed by plants and is then transferred to the atmosphere by a process known as transpiration.
Water from the soil is evaporated into the atmosphere. These processes are collectively known as evapotranspiration.
Some water in the soil seeps downward into a zone of porous rock which contains groundwater.
A permeable underground rock layer which is capable of storing, transmitting, and supplying significant amounts of water is known as an aquifer.
More precipitation than evaporation or evapotranspiration occurs over the land but most of the earth's evaporation (86%) and precipitation (78%) take place over the oceans.
The amount of precipitation and evaporation is balanced throughout the world.
While specific areas of the earth have more precipitation and less evaporation than others, and the reverse is also true, on a global scale over a few year period, everything balances out.
The locations of the water on the earth is fascinating.
You can see from the list below that very little water is among us in lakes, the soil and especially rivers.

World Water Supply by Location

Oceans - 97.08%
Ice Sheets and Glaciers - 1.99%
Ground Water - 0.62%
Atmosphere - 0.29%
Lakes (Fresh) - 0.01%
Inland Seas and Salt Water Lakes - 0.005%
Soil Moisture - 0.004%
Rivers - 0.001%
Only during the ice ages are there noticeable differences in the location of water storage on the earth.
During these cold cycles, there is less water stored in the oceans and more in ice sheets and glaciers.
It can take an individual molecule of water from a few days to thousands of years to complete the hydrologic cycle from ocean to atmosphere to land to ocean again as it can be trapped in ice for a long time.
For scientists, five main processes are included in the hydrologic cycle:
1) condensation,
2) precipitation,
3) infiltration,
4) runoff, and
5) evapotranspiration.
The continuous circulation of water in the ocean, in the atmosphere, and on the land is fundamental to the availability of water on the planet.

Matt Rosenberg, former Geography writer for ThoughtCo, is an award-winning professional geographer who has covered the field of geography on this website for more than fifteen years.
Be sure to connect with Matt on Twitter @mrgeog and on Facebook.
Experience
Matt has published two books about geography, The Handy Geography Answer Bookand The Geography Bee Complete Preparation Handbook. Matt has been featured on PBS and NPR and has conducted many interviews about geographical topics for television, radio, and newspapers. In October 2006, Matt was awarded the Excellence in Media Award from the National Council for Geographic Education for his contributions over the years to the discipline of geography.
Matt Rosenberg is a former adjunct university faculty member in geography, city planning and GIS intern for local government, newspaper columnist, and a disaster manager for the American Red Cross. Matt served on more than two dozen major disaster relief operations around the United States. He has traveled widely across North America and has visited or studied in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Education
Matt Rosenberg holds a master's degree in geography from California State University, Northridge and a bachelor's degree in geography from the University of California, Davis. Matt's master's thesis was titled Catastrophic Hazards of Ventura County, California.
Matt is a proud member of the Association of American Geographers and the National Council for Geographic Education.
Matt Rosenberg
I've loved geography ever since I took a required class on urban and economic geography my freshman year at college. It's a fascinating discipline that incorporates diverse academic subjects to discover more about the earth and where humans live. It's my goal to provide you with the Internet's number one geographical community.
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-hydrologic-cycle-1435330

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Saturday, February 3, 2018

THUNDERSTORMS - Thunderstorms originate from non-threatening fair weather cumulus cloud type. As the Sun heats the Earth's surface, some areas warm faster than others. These warmer pockets of air become less dense than the surrounding air which causes them to rise, condense, and form clouds. As precipitation accumulates within the cloud, it becomes too heavy for updrafts to support. It falls inside of the cloud, causing drag on the air. This in turn creates a region of downward directed air referred to as a downdraft.

 
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Thunderstorms
A mature thunderstorm, with anvil top.
How Do Thunderstorms Form?
By Tiffany Means

Thunderstorms

Whether you happen to be a spectator or a "spook," chances are you've never mistaken the sight or sounds of an approaching thunderstorm.
And it's no wonder why. Over 40,000 occur worldwide every day.
Of that total, 10,000 occur daily in the United States alone.

Thunderstorm Climatology

A map showing the average number of thunderstorm days each year in the U.S. (2010).
In the spring and summer months, thunderstorms seem to occur like clockwork.
But don't be fooled! Thunderstorms can occur at all times of the year, and at all hours of the day (not just afternoons or evenings). The atmospheric conditions only need be right.
So, what are these conditions, and how do they lead to storm development?

Thunderstorm Ingredients

In order for a thunderstorm to develop, 3 atmospheric ingredients must be in place: lift, instability, and moisture.

Lift

Lift is responsible for initiating the updraft--the migration of air upward into the atmosphere--which is necessary in order to produce a thunderstorm cloud (cumulonimbus).
Lift is achieved in a number of ways, the most common being through differential heating, or convection.
As the Sun heats the ground, the warmed air at the surface becomes less dense and rises. (Imagine air bubbles that rise from the bottom of a boiling water pot.)
Other lifting mechanisms include warm air overriding a cold front, cold air undercutting a warm front (both of these are known as frontal lift), air being forced upward along the side of a mountain (known as orographic lift), and air that comes together at a central point (known as convergence.

Instability

After air is given an upward nudge, it needs something to help it continue its rising motion. This "something" is instability.
Atmospheric stability is a measure of how buoyant air is.
If air is unstable, it means that it is very buoyant and once set in motion will follow that motion rather than return to its starting location.
If an unstable air mass is pushed upward by a force then it will continue upward (or if pushed down, it will continue downward).
Warm air is generally considered to be unstable because regardless of force, it has a tendency to rise (whereas cold air is more dense and sinks).

Moisture

Lift and instability result in rising air, but in order for a cloud to form, there must be sufficient moisture within the air to condense into water droplets as it ascends.
Sources of moisture include large bodies of water, like oceans and lakes.
Just as warm air temperatures aid lift and instability, warm waters aid the distribution of moisture.
They have a higher evaporation rate, which means they more readily release moisture into the atmosphere than cooler waters do.
In the U.S., the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean are the major sources of moisture for fueling severe storms.

The Three Stages

Diagram of a multicell thunderstorm consisting of individual storm cells 
- each in a different development stage. 
Arrows represent the strong up-and-down motion
(updrafts and downdrafts) which characterize thunderstorm dynamics. 
All thunderstorms, both severe and non-severe, go through 3 stages of development:
1.    the towering cumulus stage,
2.    the mature stage, and
3.    the dissipating stage.

1. The Towering Cumulus Stage

The initial stage of thunderstorm development
is dominated by the presence of updrafts. 
These grow the cloud from a cumulus
to a towering cumulonimbus.
Yes, that's cumulus as in fair weather cumulus. Thunderstorms actually originate from this non-threatening cloud type.
While at first this may seem contradictory, consider this: thermal instability (which triggers thunderstorm development) is also the very process by which a cumulus cloud forms.
As the Sun heats the Earth's surface, some areas warm faster than others.
These warmer pockets of air become less dense than the surrounding air which causes them to rise, condense, and form clouds.
However, within minutes of forming, these clouds evaporate into the drier air in the upper atmosphere.
If this happens for a long enough period of time, that air eventually moistens and from that point on, continues cloud growth rather than stifling it.
This vertical cloud growth, referred to as an updraft, is what characterizes the cumulus stage of development.
It works to build the storm. (If you've ever watched a cumulus cloud closely, you can actually see this happen. (The cloud begins burgeoning upward higher and higher into the sky.)
During the cumulus stage, a normal cumulus cloud can grow into a cumulonimbus having a height nearly 20,000 feet (6km).
At this height, the cloud passes the 0°C (32°F) freezing level and precipitation begins to form.
As precipitation accumulates within the cloud, it becomes too heavy for updrafts to support.
It falls inside of the cloud, causing drag on the air. This in turn creates a region of downward directed air referred to as a downdraft.

2. The Mature Stage

In a "mature" thunderstorm, 
n updraft and downdraft co-exist.
Everyone who has experienced a thunderstorm is familiar with its mature stage--the period when gusty winds and heavy precipitation are felt at the surface.
What may be unfamiliar, however, is the fact that a storm's downdraft is the underlying cause of these two classic thunderstorm weather conditions.
Recall that as precipitation builds within a cumulonimbus cloud, it eventually generates a downdraft.
Well, as the downdraft travels downward and exits the base of the cloud, the precipitation is released.
A rush of rain-cooled dry air accompanies it. When this air reaches the Earth's surface, it spreads out ahead of the thunderstorm cloud--an event known as the gust front.
The gust front is the reason why cool, breezy conditions are often felt at the onset of a downpour.
With the storm's updraft occurring side-by-side with its downdraft, the storm cloud continues to enlarge.
Sometimes the unstable region reaches as far up as the bottom of the stratosphere.
When the updrafts rise to that height, they begin to spread sideways. This action creates the characteristic anvil top. (Because the anvil is located very high up in the atmosphere, it is comprised of cirrus/ice crystals.)
All the while, cooler, drier (and therefore heavier) air from outside of the cloud is introduced into the cloud environment simply by the act of its growth.

3. The Dissipating Stage

Diagram of a dissipating thunderstorm
- its third and final stage. 
In time, as the cooler air outside of the cloud environment increasingly infiltrates the growing storm cloud, the storm's downdraft eventually overtakes its updraft.
With no supply of warm, moist air to maintain its structure, the storm begins to weaken.
The cloud begins to lose its bright, crisp outlines and instead appears more ragged and smudged--a sign that it is aging.

The full life cycle process takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Depending on thunderstorm type, a storm may go through it only once (single cell), or up to multiple times (multi-cell). (The gust front often triggers the growth of new thunderstorms by acting as a source of lift for neighboring moist, unstable air.)


Tiffany Means is a meteorologist, science writer, and avid cloud watcher/photographer.
Email Tiffany
Experience
Tiffany has been finding beauty skyward and sharing it with others since the age of 5. By twelve, she knew she wanted to pursue weather professionally—thanks in part to the release of the blockbuster film Twister. Since those days, Tiffany has interned with the domestic and international weather departments at CNN, written monthly climate reports for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, and participated in a number of science outreach events (such as the Science Olympiad Competition). She has personally experienced such weather greats as the Blizzard of 1993, and the floods of Hurricane Francis (2004) and Ivan (2004).
Education
Tiffany holds a bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Science with a concentration in weather forecasting from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Tiffany is a proud member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS).
Tiffany Means
"Weather affects us all. We check it on a daily basis, and talk about it with complete strangers...but it is so much more than 5-day forecasts and small talk! Through my enthusiasm for and expertise in the weather sciences, I hope to spark your curiosity about our atmosphere, create an awareness that will keep you weather ready and safe, and strengthen your environmental responsibility to our atmosphere, water, and earth."
Contact Tiffany: Tiffany can be reached at aboutweatherexpert@gmail.com with questions, comments, reprint requests, or suggestions. You can also connect with her via the social links below.
https://www.thoughtco.com/how-thunderstorms-form-3444271
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