Lake retention time (also called the residence time of lake water, or the water age or flushing time) is a calculated quantity expressing the mean time that water (or some dissolved substance) spends in a particular lake. At its simplest this figure is the result of dividing the lake volume by the flow in or out of the lake. It roughly expresses the amount of time taken for a substance introduced into a lake to flow out of it again. The retention time is especially important where pollutants are concerned.
Read more about Lake Retention Time: Global Retention Time, More Specific Residence Times, List of Residence Times of Lake Water
Famous quotes containing the words lake, retention and/or time:
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)