Teaching Climate

This is a multi-step activity that helps students measure, investigate, and understand the increase in atmospheric CO2 and the utility of carbon offsets. It also enables students to understand that carbon offsets, through reforestation, are not sufficient to balance increases in atmospheric C02 concentration.

This video, from Yale Climate Connections, explores the 2014 melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet that captured headlines. Interviews, animations, and news broadcasts explore what the melting meant for both the future of some of the Antarctic glaciers and sea level rise, and informs the viewer how seafloor terrain influences the speed of ice sheet melt.

This monthly bulletin and animation provides regular and reliable visualizations of world weather and climate events of the previous month using NOAA data. Archives are available from October 2011 to present.

This video is simple in its appearance, but it contains a wealth of relevant information about global climate models.

This interactive visualization is a suite of weather and climate datasets as well as tools with which to manipulate and display them visually.

This animation depicts global surface warming as simulated by NCAR's Community Climate System Model (CCSM) Version 3. It shows the temperature anomalies relative to the end of the 19th century, both over the entire globe and as a global average. The model shows the temporary cooling effects during 5 major volcanic eruptions and estimates future temperature trends based on different amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a series of 6 guided-inquiry activities that examine data and models that climate scientists use to attempt to answer the question of Earth's future climate.

In this video, students see how data from the ice core record is used to help scientists predict the future of our climate. Video features ice cores extracted from the WAIS Divide, a research station on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

This short video describes how the compression of Antarctic snow into ice captures air from past atmospheres. It shows how ice cores are drilled from the Antarctic ice and prepared for shipment and subsequent analysis.

This interactive map allows students to experiment with decadal average temperature projections. Overall temperatures are expected to rise throughout the century and this tool demonstrates those projected measurements.