Components of the Water Cycle on a Flat Map

  • Released Tuesday, January 11, 2011
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Water regulates climate, predominately storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. Water in the ocean and atmosphere carry heat from the tropics to the poles. The process by which water moves around the earth, from the ocean, to the atmosphere, to the land and back to the ocean is called the water cycle. The animations below each portray a component of the water cycle.

The three animations of atmospheric phenomena were created using data from the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 25-days. Variables animated here include hourly evaporation, water vapor and precipitation. For more information on GEOS-5 see http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5 . For more information on the cubed-sphere work see http://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/610.3/cubedsphere.html.

The animation of global sea surface temperature was created using data from a model run of ECCO's Ocean General Circulation Model. See http://www.ecco-group.org/model.htm for more information on ECCO.

This group of animations are an orthographic view of the data used in Components of the Water Cycle.

This animation portrays the flow of atmospheric water vapor from the GEOS-5 model

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This animation of evaporation from the GEOS-5 model shows how heating from the sun causes increased evaporation over land during the day

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This animation displays the intensity of precipitation from the GEOS-5 model, showing heavy precipitation in orange/yellow and light precipitation in purple.

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This animation of sea surface temperature from the ECCO model shows the transport of heat along the ocean's surface

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
This is a contribution of the Consortium for Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) funded by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program

This page was originally published on Tuesday, January 11, 2011.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:53 PM EDT.

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