What Is El Nino, Anyway?

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words—even from a hundred miles away! Learners review satellite data to analyze ocean variables such as temperature, salinity, evaporation, and precipitation. They look for patterns in the data and...

El Nino, La Nina ... and the Santa Maria? The 11th installment of a 23-part NOAA Enrichment in Marine sciences and Oceanography (NEMO) program explains the mechanism of El Nino/Southern Oscillation. Pupils use previous data to determine...

Ice is nice, and its condition on the planet has a significant effect. Junior geoscientists experiment with ice melting in both water and on land to discover how each affect the rising sea level. This detailed lesson outline even...

Get lost at sea amid colorful ocean currents! Learners discover the patterns of movement and temperature in the North Atlantic's currents through a simulation, part of PBS's Weather and Climate series. The resource contains background...

Students study sea surface height and temperature and other characteristics of an El Nino.  In this ocean impacts lesson students examine the factors that influence an El Nino or La Nina. 

Scientists can model global surface temperature with and without considering human emissions, but does do these factors really make a difference? Two interactive graphs demonstrate some factors that affect climate change. The first graph...

Using NASA's Live Access Server, earth scientists compare the temperature, precipitation, and normalized difference vegetation index for four different locations. They use the data to identify the climate zone of each location using...

Earth's vast ocean is full of mysteries! Science scholars discover the big-picture properties that influence its characteristics at different latitudes using a lesson from PBS's Weather and Climate series. After completing a background...

Students compare graphs of weather occurrences. In this environmental lesson plan, students will being using the website to gather weather related information for a certain time period. The students will then graph the data that will be...

Begin by showing a six-minute video, Changing Planet: Rising Sea Level as an anticipatory set. Pupils draw a topographic map of a potato continent. Finally, they will visit NOAA's sea levels online map and NASA's carbon dioxide...