EarthNow Climate Digest

Earth Now, NOAA/CIMMS

This visualization provides an informative summary of the quarterly seasonal global weather and climate using the 3-D Science on a Sphere format. These video summaries use animations of recent NOAA data and an engaging commentary to review the climate highlights of the past 4 seasons. Topics include, El Nino/La Nina, temperature trends, extreme weather, and emerging climate research.

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Notes from our reviewers

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.

Teacher resources are not available but visualization can easily be incorporated into curriculum, units, or activities.
This visualization summarizes information from the seasonal climate reports put out by NOAA. Educators can download this information and run it on the Science on Sphere platform, read the information online, or view it in Youtube videos. The site has up-to-date information from the most recent climate report from the previous four seasons. There is no access to previous years. The videos tie in research, for example including information about tropical storm speeds, so it is more informative than just a digest of weather events. Comments from expert scientist: Scientific strengths: - This resource reviews quarterly the seasonal summary based on NOAA data - Highlights the importance of having a disaster readiness plan even if you live in a state not used to natural disasters - Includes Global 3-month land temperatures, 3-month Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies, satellite imagery, and animations of other natural phenomena such as the August 21 total solar eclipse - Narrator clearly explains what the colors mean on the simulations
The visualization can be viewed online via EarthNow website or YouTube and downloaded from an FTP site link. Links to Science on a Sphere data are also provided, but educators would need access to the Science on a Sphere software to visualize the videos through this format. Teachers should be aware that the four seasonal links provided always appear in the same order but do not link to events in chronological order, depending on what time of year you access them. For example, if viewing the page in late June, the 'winter' video is older than the 'spring' video. They are replaced or refreshed as each new season is ready to display.