Eli5 why water doesn’t go back to liquid ? It need to be 100°C to evaporate but once in the air it is not 100°C anymore so how is it that it stay gaz?

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Eli5 why water doesn’t go back to liquid ? It need to be 100°C to evaporate but once in the air it is not 100°C anymore so how is it that it stay gaz?

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Water always evaporates and always condenses back into liquid, but at different speeds dependent on temperature and the availability of liquid and gaseous water. If evaporation is currently faster than condensation then the net effect is that liquid water becomes water vapor. Conversely, if condensation is currently faster than evaporation then water vapor becomes liquid. 100 degrees is the temperature at which evaporation overtakes condensation no matter how much water vapor there already is (at atmospheric pressure). This means that even within a volume of liquid water evaporating molecules will stay gaseous and not condense back – the process which we can witness as boiling.

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