Teaching Climate

Resource Watch features hundreds of data sets all in one place on the state of the planet's resources and citizens. Users can visualize challenges facing people and the planet, from climate change to poverty, water risk to state instability, air pollution to human migration.

This video on phenology of plants and bees discusses the MODIS satellite finding that springtime greening is happening one half-day earlier each year and correlates this to bee pollination field studies.

This video looks at the impact of changing climate on animal habitats around the world, showing how different creatures are responding to changing temperatures and precipitation patterns.

In this activity, students use Google Earth to explore global temperature changes during a recent 50 - 58 year period. They also explore, analyze, and interpret climate patterns of 13 different cities, and analyze differences between weather and climate patterns.

In this activity, students research changes to the environment in the Arctic/Bering Sea over time using oral and photographic histories. Developed for Alaska Native students, this activity can be customized for other regions.

In this activity, students reconstruct past climates using lake varves as a proxy to interpret long-term climate patterns. Students use data from sediment cores to understand annual sediment deposition and how it relates to weather and climate patterns.

This activity tells a story through the eyes of a salmon, as told by Indigenous tribes of the Northwest. It celebrates traditional knowledge and how humans can think about the natural world through the view point of salmon.

This resource from NOAA provides a full unit on observation vs. modeling. It includes a series of 8 activities that use a virtual reality model and graphs to introduce concepts in the construction and application of scientific models. Students will use observations to create and validate models with a temperature and fisheries management case study and understand how the simplicity and assumptions of a model will effect its forecasting power.

Through the five lessons in this module, students will explore relationships between carbon dioxide, ocean pH, and aragonite saturation state. By examining these parameters using interactive graphs and models, students can predict whether ocean conditions support the growth and survival of shell-building marine life, both now and in the future.

This self-paced online resource from NOAA explores the relationship between water quality and estuarine ecology through a series of 5 levels that range from one to two 45 minute class periods.