Water vapour cools and
condenses to become clouds.
Water is evaporated into
the air from the land and
seas by the heat of the sun.
Plants lose water into the
air through their leaves
via evaporation.
Rain and snow
(precipitation) falls
onto the land.
RIVER GAUGING STATION
RAINFALL OBSERVATION POINT
Underground water filters
through the ground
towards the sea.
Water runs off the land
into rivers and burns.
Rivers and burns flow
downstream towards the sea.
The journey
Water is removed from
our rivers and burns for
agriculture, industry and
power generation. We
control how much, where
and when this water can
be removed.
of
wa
ter
Diffuse pollution can
happen when bacteria,
chemicals or other harmful
pollutants are washed from the
land into our watercourses,
usually after heavy rainfall.
We monitor
bathing water
quality at 83 sites
across Scotland
between 1 June
and 15 September
each year.
We have 392 river
monitoring
stations on
Scotland’s rivers
measuring river
flows.
Information from 267 of
our rainfall sites feed into
the national rainfall archive,
looked after by the Met
Office. This data is used by
many organisations for
weather and flood
forecasting, climatology
and water resource
management.
Over the years
our water environment
has been subjected to many
pressures, resulting in many
of them being shadows of what
they once were. We provide
funding of over £1million each
year to improve Scotland’s
water environment.