In environmental terms, the residence time definition is adapted to fit with ground water, the atmosphere, glaciers, lakes, streams, and oceans. More specifically it is the time during which water remains within an aquifer, lake, river, or other water body before continuing around the hydrological cycle. The time involved may vary from days for shallow gravel aquifers to millions of years for deep aquifers with very low values for hydraulic conductivity. Residence times of water in rivers are a few days, while in large lakes residence time ranges up to several decades. Residence times of continental ice sheets is hundreds of thousands of years, of small glaciers a few decades.
Ground water residence time applications are useful for determining the amount of time it will take for a pollutant to reach and contaminate a ground water drinking water source and at what concentration it will arrive. This can also work to the opposite effect to determine how long until a ground water source becomes uncontaminated via inflow, outflow, and volume. The residence time of lakes and streams is important as well to determine the concentration of pollutants in a lake and how this may affect the local population and marine life.
Hydrology, the study of water, discusses the water budget in terms of residence time. The amount of time that water spends in each different stage of life (glacier, atmosphere, ocean, lake, stream, river), is used to show the relation of all of the water on the earth and how it relates in its different forms.