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Contact: Richard Brill, 845-9488	Air Date: March 17, 1998

Where does all the rain water go?   When it rains, do you ever wonder where all that water goes? Richard Brill, an earth and physical science professor at Honolulu Community College says water from rain basically winds up in one of two places: some of it drains back into the ocean, the rest evaporates back into the atmosphere as water vapor. Brill says it's all part of the hydrologic cycle. At any time, about 98 percent of all the water on Earth is in the oceans. Most of the rest is frozen into polar ice caps and glaciers. A very small amount is in the form of water vapor in the atmosphere. This is where it condenses into clouds and eventually falls, again, as rain, over land or over the ocean. This evaporation and condensation of water in the atmosphere and on the surface is the driving force behind the action of storms and weather systems. This is the University Report, I'm Tracy Orillo Donovan.

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