Ali Whitmer, Bruce Caron, LuAnn Dahlman, David Herring, Ray Tschillard, Betsy Youngman, Earth Exploration Toolbook
This activity introduces students to visualization capabilities available through NASA's Earth Observatory, global map collection, NASA NEO and ImageJ. Using these tools, students build several animations of satellite data that illustrate carbon pathways through the Earth system.
The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.
Consider using the approach in a more open-ended instruction
in Part 1 step 1 students are directed to the Experiments section of the NASA Earth Observatory website. The link to this activity is now in the Global Maps section: [http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/GlobalMaps/view.php?d1=MOD11C1_M_LSTDA&d2=MOD13A2_M_NDVI]
Put students into groups and use a jigsaw approach to reduce the amount of time this EET chapter would take to complete.
Activity is based on a case study of where the missing carbon is in the Earth's carbon cycle.
Scientific uncertainty in overall knowledge about the total global carbon cycle may be overstated in activity. The scientific community knows a lot about the carbon cycle, its fluxes, its sources and sinks - the activity implies that the scientific community doesn't know a lot - in fact, only a small fraction of the total global carbon cycle is unaccounted for.
Activity focuses on the annual cycles of the vegetation/ocean part of the carbon cycle and does not address other sources, sinks and time scales in detail.
Comments from expert scientist: This activity is based on the same data that climate scientists use from public repositories provided by NASA. It gives students an accurate representation of the same work that climate scientists use on a daily basis.
Very dense but extremely well scaffolded activity.
Students may have difficulty with one of the most important learning standards e.g. describe evidence for carbon's movement through the Earth system.
The instructor will need to think carefully about how to assess students' understanding of their analysis of the visualizations, the relationships among three sets of data, and carbon pathways in the carbon cycle.
Websites linked to from activity have changed so some of the tools and practice activities are not currently available - could be updated fairly easily by someone at TERC but is it worth the time and effort.
Professional Development is available and might be very useful for educator
Requires a bank of computers.
Must download the free Image J software.
