Teaching Climate

In this resource, students learn about freshwater resources, how NASA uses satellites to measure precipitation, and how that data can be used in agricultural practices. Students use data from the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement satellite to explore precipitation patterns in two parts of the world and then make recommendations for how to reduce water use in agriculture and in their own lives.

In this visualization, users click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up. The visualization teaches users about the relationship between precipitation and freshwater in the US.

This cartoon shows where streams start and where they end up.

This lesson is an instructor demonstration that focuses specifically on two aspects of the water cycle: evaporation and condensation. This is a well described instructor led demonstration for introducing and exploring the water cycle.

This classroom activity is aimed at an understanding of different ecosystems by understanding the influence of temperature and precipitation. Students correlate graphs of vegetation vigor with those of temperature and precipitation data for four diverse ecosystems, ranging from near-equatorial to polar, and spanning both hemispheres to determine which climatic factor is limiting growth.

This activity focuses on measuring, graphing, and interpreting rainfall following an 8 day rainfall event story in Boulder, Colorado from 2013. Data is from this real world example, and background materials including how to read the rain gauge are included.

This activity contains lesson plans aimed at teaching about water resources, water use and conservation, and the importance of personal and household choices regarding water use.

This activity provides information on how to access and use a wealth of data and tools from NOAA to analyze climate through time. A video tutorial and background information are provided and show students how to interact with and use tools to analyze temperature and precipitation data for specific cities, states, countries, and the world.

Through this resource from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), students will define, investigate, and answer questions about what caused the megadrought in the Colorado River Basin from 2000-2021. This lesson uses text, contextual videos, and datasets from NOAA and NASA to teach the concepts of megadrought and evapotranspiration.

This comprehensive student and teacher guide from the MIT Climate Portal includes an introductory 10 minute podcast about water and climate change impacts, a water cycle class game, independent understanding of local solutions to climate change threats, and a wrap-up discussion. The focus of the materials is on changes to precipitation patterns and the downstream effects, such as how diseases like Malaria are influenced by rainfall and temperature.