What Comes After Condensation in the Water Cycle?

Precipitation

• When water vapor condenses, it forms droplets of liquid water. As these droplets grow, they become too heavy for the atmosphere to support and fall to earth as precipitation. Although many people imagine rain when they think of this stage, it also includes hail, sleet, freezing rain and snow. What begins as one form of precipitation in the upper atmosphere can also evolve into another form by the time it reaches the ground. For example, hail begins as a mixture of snow and rain, which freezes into balls of ice.

Groundwater and Runoff

• No matter what form of precipitation falls, it usually becomes liquid water, which either soaks into the ground or accumulates on its surface as runoff. Most runoff eventually makes its way into a river, lake or ocean, where it nourishes a large portion of the world's animal and plant life. However, some of it seeps into the ground, where it becomes groundwater. Groundwater that sinks all the way through the soil until it hits rock or clay forms an aquifer, or an underground river that people can tap into to create wells.

Evaporation and Transpiration

• As water absorbs energy from the sun, its molecules vibrate faster and move farther apart. When it contains enough energy, it becomes water vapor, which returns to the atmosphere in a process called evaporation. Plants also release water vapor as a byproduct of photosynthesis, which they release to the atmosphere through transpiration. Together, evaporation and transpiration return most of the world's water to the atmosphere to perpetuate the water cycle.

Transport

• Water vapor does not remain over the land from which it came; it moves from place to place through diffusion and convection. Diffusion spreads the gas throughout the atmosphere by molecular movement, similar to how water spreads out to fill its container. Convection occurs when one portion of the atmosphere becomes warm and rises, causing cooler gases to move and take its place. As the warm air rises, it cools and falls again, creating a cycle called a convection cell. This causes wind, which transports water vapor from one place to another. This causes the moisture that evaporates from a large body of water to move over land, where it can condense and fall again as precipitation.