Teaching Tips

• Educators will have to make the connection between weather patterns and climate change. The visualizations are for current weather trends. This makes it easy to relate these maps to current news reports.
• If educators are teaching a unit on weather and climate, they could use this site to track changes and predictions in weather over the time of the unit.
• Guide students to hover over the 'temperature' or 'precipitation' links under each category and the map will change. Clicking on the category itself will open a web page containing data about that aspect of climate prediction.

About the Content

• Comprehensive collection of current weather and long-term climate data.
• NOAA/National Weather Service website includes additional webpages describing how these maps are produced.
• Comments from expert scientist: The strengths are the detail and breadth of information and data. I was able to look at numerous metrics of climate and weather in the present, predictions for the future, and summaries, reports, and raw data from the past. Links provided to external sources of information (NIDIS, etc.) are very helpful and round out the content of the site itself.

About the Pedagogy

• This collection of interactive visualizations is a great way to compare current weather trends to historic patterns.
• The maps themselves should be easy for most high school students to understand; younger students will need guidance.
• Links to pages that describe how to read the maps are provided.

• This resource engages students in using scientific data.
  See other data-rich activities

Technical Details/Ease of Use

• The various maps in this collection can be viewed online and opened and saved as image files on web browsers. The outlook maps can be viewed as lines-only or color-filled.
• The graphic clarity could be improved.