Comments on: Graeme Stephens describes satellite’s look at Earth’s water cycle

By: Jenny Shallard

Jenny Shallard — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:52:55 +0000

Water is always on the move. Rain falling where you live may have been water in the ocean just days before. And the water you see in a river or stream may have been snow on a high mountaintop. Water can be in the atmosphere, on the land, in the ocean, and even underground. It is recycled over and over through the water cycle. We human all need water to survive. No matter who you are or how famous you are, you still need water to survive, even the most renown personalities like Ophra, Obama and Amanda Seyfried they all need water to survive.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 22:10:27 +0000

instead of looking up to understand we first must take care of what we all live upon. It’s high time that issues such as nuclear waste which was dumped into under water cavnerns in the artic, which are now leaking and also entering the Earths water supply should be retrieved and made safe. Sewage treatment plants must become a priority to those countries which now just pump it into lakes rivers streams and the Ocean which recives it all. Before we look to understand the clouds we must repair the cloudy water, right here on Earth.

By: Ought Thoughts

Ought Thoughts — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:50:20 +0000

I’m wondering how many times, if at all, the water cycle has completed a full cycle, in human history?

How much water has the human population consumed? Enough that waste emissions have flowed into an ocean, evaporated, and rained back down to a source river or lake, to be consumed again?

Charts on the internet show that fresh water is but 3% of total water and but 0.3% of that is surface water.

Further, as we understand more about clouds, we may find that water’ time in the cloud segment of its cyclical journey may be longer than we first thought. As such, it’s possible that clouds are a station during which a process of sterilizing is ongoing. Evaporation leaves particles (salts, etc) in the ocean’s basins while H2O as vapour rises and condenses into clouds. There, some process occurs in which the sun’s rays react with the water in the clouds to burn away impurities that rose with the vapour, before that cleansed water rains down to provide fresh water for earth’s inhabitants to consume?

Keeping in mind that nature itself had a system for dealing with sewage sludge before humans built sanitation stations, right?

However, if we have yet to complete a cycle, perhaps we have not yet begun to consume water that had been previously consumed by the ancients…?

Thanks for any consideration of the above.

By: Jack Jenkins

Jack Jenkins — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:16:41 +0000

Before I retired I was a staff engineer at the NSCL lab so I am not a crackpot but I do have a question that the mainstream seems to be overlooking. The question is about the temperature gradient that tilts toward the troposphere-stratosphere boundary from both above and below. The huge amount of energy being emitted by water vapor crystallizing there causes that place to be the coldest place in the atmosphere. It must be caused by the emitting of photons of about 18 um wave length for each vapor molecule that is being extinguished because that wavelength is both the vapor sublimation energy per particle and the gap from the top of the waters infrared window (8 um) to its bottom (14 um). Energies in that range are illegal. Water vapor does not go above the cold height and conditions there seem right for stimulated or spontaneous emittion of such photons. Do you have equipment to see that IR selectively over the 10 to 20 um range.