In this activity, students explore three indicators of drought are: soil moisture, lack of precipitation, and decreased streamflows. Students investigate each of these parameters develop a sense for the effects of drought on land.
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How much do you know about the frozen poles of our home planet?
In this activity, you will use an inexpensive spectrophotometer* to test how light at different visible wavelengths (blue, green, red) is transmitted, or absorbed, through four different colored water samples.
This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.
Students use Phytopia: Exploration of the Marine Ecosystem, a computer-based tool, to investigate various phytoplankton species and topics relating to phytoplankton biology.
These six graphs show Ocean Chlorophyll Concentrations from 1998 - 2018 in a variety of locations: East Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, California Coast, Southeastern US/Gulf of Mexico, Northeastern US and the Scotian Shelf, and the Hawaiian Islands.
Students are divided into three different groups and are assigned a category of drivers of change in regional trends of freshwater storage (Climate Change, Human Activity, and Natural Variability).
Students identify patterns and describe the relationship between chlorophyll concentration and incoming shortwave radiation.
Students identify patterns in chlorophyll concentration data to formulate their explanations of phytoplankton distribution.