Learn more about Teaching Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness»
See how this Static Visualization supports the Next Generation Science Standards»
Grade Level
This tool would also be very useful for college level.
Topics
Climate Literacy
This Static Visualization builds on the following concepts of Climate Literacy.
Click a topic below for supporting information, teaching ideas, and sample activities.
- Humans can take action
- Climate is variable
- Our understanding of climate
- Climate change has consequences
Energy Literacy
This Static Visualization builds on the following concepts of Energy Literacy.
Click a topic below for supporting information, teaching ideas, and sample activities.
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
Teaching Tips | Science | Pedagogy |
Technical Details
Teaching Tips
- Teacher resources are not available but visualization can easily be incorporated into curriculum, units, or activities.
About the Content
- 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
About the Pedagogy
- This resource is useful for providing a comprehensive summary of the latest climate report information from NOAA. Educators can use it to explore the climate-related events that occur in each season.
- One of the videos has a Spanish language version.
Technical Details/Ease of Use
- 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.
Related URLs These related sites were noted by our reviewers but have not been reviewed by CLEAN
It would be advantageous for teachers to look at the related sites:- https://sos.noaa.gov/What_is_SOS/ - A general overview of Science on a Sphere
- https://sos.noaa.gov/Datasets/ - Data sets available for Science on a Sphere
- https://sos.noaa.gov/SOS_Explorer/ - A flat screen version of Science on a Sphere
