Air Temperatures

Check out the Arctic and Earth SIGNs video to explore how climate models are used in climate change research.

The activities in this guide will help students understand variations in environmental parameters by examining connections among different phenomena measured on local, regional and global scales. As students look at the connections between environmental data, they will see that the environment is the result of the interplay among many processes that take place on varying time and spatial scales.

Students move through a series of short activities to explore and evaluate global solar radiation data from NASA satellites.  In this process, students make qualitative and quantitative observations about seasonal variations in net energy input to the Earth System.

Students review Earth System phenomena that are affected by soil moisture.  They analyze and evaluate maps of seasonal global surface air temperature and soil moisture data from NASA satellites. Building from their observations, students will select a location in the U.S. to extract scientific data and then create Behavior Over Time (BOT) graphs for each variable and communicate their findings.

Examine (daytime) surface temperature and solar radiation received at locations found near similar latitudes using NASA Data.

NASA visualizers take data – numbers, codes – and turn them into animations people can see and quickly understand. You can become a data visualizer by creating your own flipbook animations using maps of science variables that NASA scientists commonly study to better understand the Earth System. There are six flipbooks available for different science variables: aerosols, cloud coverage, vegetation concentrations, precipitation, incoming solar radiation, and surface temperature. Each frame in the flipbooks shows monthly averages collected in 2016 and 2017.