Mini Lesson/Activity

Creating an El Niño Poster Model

Overview

Students will use coloring sheets to create a color coded model of El Niño and analyze it. If the Data Literacy Map Cube is used with this, students will color their models first.

Student Directions

El Niño is a condition that sometimes occurs in the Pacific Ocean, but it is so big that it affects weather all over the world. Weather depends a lot on ocean temperatures. Where the ocean is warm, more clouds form, and more rain falls in that part of the world. In the Pacific Ocean, near the equator, the Sun makes the water especially warm on the surface. Normally, strong winds along the equator push the warm surface water near South America westward toward Indonesia. When this happens, the cooler water underneath rises up toward the surface of the ocean near South America.

However, in the fall and winter of some years, these winds are much weaker than usual. They actually blow the other way (toward South America instead of Indonesia) in October. This shift alters the sea surface height across the Pacific, making the ocean higher in some areas and lower in others.

Using the 2 sheets provided, fill in the colors depicting the El Niño models sea surface height anomaly data from 2014 and 2015 and answer the following questions. Sea surface height anomaly is the difference above or below normal.

Use crayons in the following colors:

Purple
Blue
Light Blue
Green
Yellow
Orange
Red

Model Page 1. Source: Modeled after El Nino NASA JPL

Model Page 2. Source: Modeled after El Nino NASA JPL

Steps:

Check with your instructor on how to submit your answers.
Each color represents the difference between the normal sea level in centimeters. What is the approximate range of the difference between normal sea level for each color?
Answer the following questions.

What do negative numbers represent?
What does zero represent?
Compare the images from the different months.
1. What differences do you see between March 2014 and July 2014?
2. What differences do you see between July 2014 and November 2014?
3. What differences do you see between November 2014 and March 2015?
4. What differences do you see between March 2015 and July 2015?
5. What differences do you see between July 2015 and November 2015?
Explain what happened over the year.

This lesson is inspired by The El Nino Poster from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1).

Sources:

“Ocean Surface Topography From Space.” The El Nino Poster, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/1005/el-nino-poster/. Accessed 23 April 2019.
A Still-Growing El Niño Set to Bear Down on U.S. (2015, December 29). NASA. Retrieved October 19, 2022, from https://sealevel.nasa.gov/news/29/a-still-growing-el-nino-set-to-bear-down-on-us/.

Teacher Note

Students will use coloring sheets to create a color coded model of El Niño. If the Data Literacy Map Cube is used with this, students should color their models first.

Teachers, these mini lessons/student activities are perfect "warm up" tasks that can be used as a hook, bell ringer, exit slip, etc. They take less than a class period to complete. Learn more on the "My NASA Data What are Mini Lessons?" page.

Teachers who are interested in receiving the answer key, please complete the Teacher Key Request and Verification Form. We verify that requestors are teachers prior to sending access to the answer keys as we’ve had many students try to pass as teachers to gain access.