Water+Cycle

In a water cycle, there are 4 steps: evaporation (and transpiration), condensation, precipitation, and collection. The evaporation is when the sun heats up water in rivers, lakes, or the ocean and turns it into vapor or steam. The water vapor or steam leaves the river, lake or ocean and goes into the air. Water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into water, forming clouds. This is called condensation. Precipitation happens when a lot of water Fillls the air and it cannot hold it anymore. The clouds get heavy and water falls back to the earth which is now either rain, hail, sleet or snow. When water falls back to earth as precipitation, it may fall back in the oceans, lakes or rivers or it can end up on land. When it ends up on land, it will either soak into the earth and become part of the ground water that plants and animals use to drink or it may run over the soil and collect in the oceans, lakes or rivers where the cycle starts all over again.

The Willamette Valley water cycle starts at the Pacific Ocean, because it is the closest one to Oregon. As it starts evaporating it becomes a cloud. Then it either starts raining, snowing, hailing, or sleeting. In the Salem area the rain stays and floods the city. It other areas it sometimes goes as ground water and goes back to the ocean. As it starts getting closer and closer to the ocean it starts becoming salt water, in a area very close to the ocean. Once it gets to the ocean those stages go by over and over again.

Source(s): @http://www.kidzone.ws/water/ @http://www.wou.edu/las/physci/taylor/g473/andrew_es473_sp2008_poster.ppt

Source(s): @http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/hyd/evap.rxml @http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation @http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleevaporation.html