Water and the Weather
The water cycle, clouds, rain and the water from the tap, with experiments to carry out at home with an adult.
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- Free of charge, no accountNo registration, no trial, no paid tier. There is nothing to create in order to read.
- One page per chapterEvery chapter is a web page at its own address: it can be read, shared and printed on its own.
- Readable offlineThe site installs itself and can be read again with no network. A page already open stays open.
- The text can be reusedUnder CC BY 4.0: adapt it, translate it, print it, and sell the print run too.
What this volume contains
A complete course on the water cycle and on the weather: changes of state, invisible vapour, clouds, precipitation, runoff, groundwater, rivers, drinking water, measuring instruments and how to read a forecast. The mechanisms set out here are universal; the chapter on tap water and the one on weather warnings take France as their example, and say so. Every chapter announces its objectives, works through its examples, and closes on a self-check with a full answer.
What the volume assumes you already know No prior science is assumed: it is enough to be able to read a continuous text, take down a number and copy it into the right place in a table. The volume installs the vocabulary, the measurements and the habits of observation of water and of the weather.
The contents
- 1Before you beginWhy this volume exists, what it covers and what it does not, how to read it, and to whom the house owes what it has written here.
- 2Chapter 1. Water changes stateThe three states of water, the changes that take it from one to another, and the difference between a puddle drying and a pan boiling.
- 3Chapter 2. Water vapour in the airHow much water the air can hold, why that depends on its temperature, and under exactly what condition this water becomes visible again.
- 4Chapter 3. How a cloud formsWhat a cloud is made of, why it stays up, the four ways of making one, and how what we see in the sky is named.
- 5Chapter 4. Rain, snow and hailHow a cloud droplet becomes a drop that falls, how each form of precipitation is named, and what a millimetre of rain means.
- 6Chapter 5. Runoff and infiltrationWhat happens to a raindrop once it has touched the ground, and what decides whether it leaves along the surface or goes down.
- 7Chapter 6. Rivers and catchmentsHow the waters of a territory gather into a single watercourse, where the water that flows in high summer comes from, and what a watershed is.
- 8Chapter 7. The water cycle, wholePutting the previous chapters together into a single loop, understanding why it has neither beginning nor end, and seeing what it keeps and what it separates.
- 9Chapter 8. From the river to the tap, the French exampleThe man-made journey water makes between the natural environment and a tap, then from the tap back to the environment, described on the example of France.
- 10Chapter 9. Measuring the weatherThe quantities that are recorded, the instruments that measure them, the conditions that make a measurement comparable, and how to keep a weather notebook.
- 11Chapter 10. Reading a weather forecastHow a forecast is made, why it loses accuracy as the range grows, and what the four colours of a warning map mean.
- 12Chapter 11. Weather and climateTwo words that are confused every day, the scale of time that separates them, and what a climatological normal is.
- 13Answers to the self-checksThe answers to every self-check in the volume, gathered in reading order, with the full reasoning and not only the result.
- 14GlossaryEvery term defined by this volume, gathered in alphabetical order, with a definition that stands without having reread the chapter it came from.
- 15Appendix. School correspondencesWhat the stage of this volume means, and where it sits in the school systems of the main French-speaking countries.
- 16SourcesEvery page opened in order to write this volume, with its address and the date of consultation, plus what was set aside and why.
- 17The images in this volumeThe five photographs in this volume, with their title at the source, their author, the address of their page of origin, their licence and the date on which it was checked.
The volume in detail
- Shelf
- Natural sciences
- Stage in the progression
- Foundations
- What the volume assumes you already know
- No prior science is assumed: it is enough to be able to read a continuous text, take down a number and copy it into the right place in a table. The volume installs the vocabulary, the measurements and the habits of observation of water and of the weather.
- Chapters
- 17
- Estimated pages in print
- ≈ 152
- Formats served
- Reading online
- Languages published
- 2
- Licence of the text
- CC BY 4.0
- Checked on
The caveat about mistakes
Every volume of this publishing house is read over by someone who did not write it. Double checking reduces mistakes, it does not remove them: this volume may therefore still contain some. Report what you find to labibliotheque@odersa.org, giving the chapter and the exact sentence; ODERSA corrects the text, redates the volume and says what has changed. This book informs and replaces neither an official curriculum, nor a teacher, nor a professional in the field: the mechanisms it sets out are universal, but the schemes, the institutions and the national figures it quotes hold for the country named at the point where they are quoted, and are to be read again at their source.
The colophon
- Written by
- ODERSA
- Checked by
- A reading pass carried out separately from the writing, chapter by chapter: arguments gone over again, self-checks answered afresh using only the knowledge the volume has already given, sources reopened one by one.
- Typeset
- Set in Source Serif 4 and Public Sans, two typefaces under the OFL licence, by the house generator, without any outside dependency.