What is water current and air current?

What is water current and air current?

Water currents flow in rivers, lakes, and, oceans. Electric currents flow through power lines or as lightning. Air Currents. Moving air is called wind. Air currents are winds that move in a riverlike flow in a certain direction.

What is the relationship between wind and water currents?

Winds blowing on the surface of the ocean push the water. Friction is the coupling between the wind and the water’s surface. A wind blowing for 10 hours across the ocean will cause the surface waters to flow at about 2% of the wind speed. Water will pile up in the direction the wind is blowing.

What causes air and water currents on Earth?

Ocean currents can be caused by wind, density differences in water masses caused by temperature and salinity variations, gravity, and events such as earthquakes or storms. Currents are cohesive streams of seawater that circulate through the ocean.

What are the 5 major currents?

The five major circulation patterns formed by the currents on this map are the world’s five major ocean gyres: North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific.

What is a air current?

noun. a mass of air moving from one area to another. the strength of the rising air current caused by the hills.

What is meant by water current?

Water current is the rate of movement in the water, and ways to describe water current include its speed and direction. There are different types of water currents which behave in different ways because they are affected by separate variables.

How does water current affect climate?

Ocean currents act as conveyer belts of warm and cold water, sending heat toward the polar regions and helping tropical areas cool off, thus influencing both weather and climate. When water molecules are heated, they exchange freely with the air in a process called evaporation.

How do oceans affect climate?

Ocean currents act much like a conveyer belt, transporting warm water and precipitation from the equator toward the poles and cold water from the poles back to the tropics. Thus, currents regulate global climate, helping to counteract the uneven distribution of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface.

Why are currents different temperatures?

Deep ocean currents Differences in water density, resulting from the variability of water temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline), also cause ocean currents. In cold regions, such as the North Atlantic Ocean, ocean water loses heat to the atmosphere and becomes cold and dense.

What happens when warm and cold currents meet?

This is because air above the warm currents is warm which contains water vapour. When this warm current meet the cold current, the air above the cold current, causes the water vapour of the warm current to condense into tiny particles which form fog.

What are types of oceans?

The five oceans are connected and are actually one huge body of water, called the global ocean or just the ocean.

• The Global Ocean. The five oceans from smallest to largest are: the Arctic, Southern, Indian, Atlantic and Pacific.
• The Arctic Ocean.
• The Southern Ocean.
• The Indian Ocean.
• The Atlantic Ocean.
• The Pacific Ocean.

What are currents?

Currents are movements of ocean water in a continuous flow, created largely by surface winds but also partly by temperature and salinity gradients, Earth’s rotation, and tides (the gravitational effects of the sun and moon).

How do air currents flow through the atmosphere?

Air current s flow in the atmosphere, the layer of air surrounding the Earth. Water currents flow in river s, lake s, and, ocean s. Electric current s flow through power line s or as lightning. Moving air is called wind.

What causes wind currents in the ocean?

Winds can also contribute to upwelling, or currents that move cold, nutrient -rich water from the bottom of the ocean to the surface. The spin of the Earth from west to east causes ocean currents to swerve to the right north of the Equator and to the left south of the Equator.

Where do ocean currents flow?

These currents are on the ocean’s surface and in its depths, flowing both locally and globally. Map of temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean shows the warm Gulf Stream current along the East Coast of the United States transporting heat northward towards the cooler high latitudes. (NOAA) Winds, water density, and tides all drive ocean currents.