Earth ID: 3811

Components of the Water Cycle on a Flat Map

| Visualizations by Cindy Starr TBD

Climate describes an aggregated view of regional or planetary temperature, air pressure, precipitation, and other meteorological conditions. In other words, climate describes the planet's generalized state-of-being. Heat exchange, precipitation, atmospheric chemistry and many other details all play a role in determining what regional or global climate conditions may be at any given time. But one thing's clear: water regulates the works. In various forms, water stores heat during the day and releases it at night. Tropical waters flow towards the poles, circulating heat around the planet. Ice crystals in the form of clouds reflects sunlight back into space. The images below portray different aspects of the planet's water cycle, broken into independent layers. Data used for many of the scenes shown here come from several computer models, including GEOS-5, and the ECCO General Circulation model.

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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Story Credits

Visualizers/Animators:
Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC)
Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)

Lead Scientists:
Matthew Rodell (NASA/GSFC)
William Putman (NASA/GSFC)
Dimitris Menemenlis (NASA/JPL CalTech)

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

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3811

Data Used:

Sea Surface Temperature

Model - ECCO

http://www.ecco-group.org/

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GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere also referred to as: GEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere

Model - NASA GMAO

The model is the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 30-days. GEOS-5 is described here http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/ and the cubed-sphere work is described here http://sivo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cubedsphere_overview.html.

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