This investigation introduces students to the significant environmental changes occurring around the world. The investigation uses NASA satellite images of Brazil to illustrate deforestation as one type of environmental change.

This activity is modified from the USDA/US Forest Services' lesson found in the Natural Inquirer newsletter.  The purpose of this hands-on activity is to engage students in a similar process for monitoring forests as NASA scientists use to study the Biosphere, whereby they apply what they know of

In this lesson, students will investigate the drivers of climate change, including adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, sea level rise, and the effect of decreasing sea ice on temperatures.

Dr. Eric Brown de Colstoun is a Physical Scientist in the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory, NASA/GSFC, where he has been working for over 15 years. His expertise in the field of remote sensing is broad, having used data collected at various spatial scales, with a variety of instrumentation (laboratory, field, airborne, satellite). 

This activity invites students to model and observe the effect of melting ice sheets (from land) on sea level and the difference between the effect of melting sea-ice to that of melting land ice on sea level.

This USGS activity leads students to an understanding of what remote sensing means and how researchers use it to study changes to the Earth’s surface, such as deforestation. 

Check out this interview, taken from the NASA Earth Science Week video, where Janel is interviewed about her experiences with the weather, as a child and now as a weather forecaster.

Every day, scientists at NASA work on creating better hurricanes on a computer screen. At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a team of scientists spends its days incorporating millions of atmospheric observations. Sophisticated graphic tools and lines of computer code to create computer models simulating the weather and climate conditions responsible for hurricanes.

Dr. Comiso received his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the University of the Philippines, Masters Degree in Physics from Florida State University and Ph. D. in physics from the University of California in Los Angeles. He held a post-doctoral position at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and worked as a senior consultant for Computer Sciences Corporation before joining NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Christy Hansen is the project manager on an airborne campaign for Earth science called Operation IceBridge. IceBridge teams are all over the country. We have scientists, instrument managers, we have a data center, we have aircraft offices all over. This project flies up to nine different geophysical instruments installed on the aircraft to collect data on the changing ice sheets, the sea ice and the glaciers.