Students will investigate the role of clouds and their contribution (if any) to global warming. Working in cooperative groups, students will make a claim about the future role clouds will play in Earth’s Energy Budget if temperatures continue to increase.

Students differentiate between data sets of monthly shortwave radiation and monthly cloud coverage to discover a relationship between radiation and clouds by answering analysis questions.

Students review a video showing how the ocean is warmed by solar energy. This is the first video of a four-part series on the water cycle, which follows the journey of water from the ocean to the atmosphere, to the land, and back again to the ocean.

In this interactive, students will identify the forms of energy we receive, analyze patterns in the amount of incoming solar radiation over time, and explain why some locations on Earth have greater variability in the amount of incoming solar radiation throughout a year.

In this interactive, students will observe the effects of albedo, clouds, aerosols, and greenhouse gases on Earth's Energy Budget and differentiate between the concepts of reflection and absorption. 

In this interactive, students will identify and describe the different components and flows of energy of the Earth's Energy Budget diagram as well as the imbalances that exist in Earth's Energy Budget.

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 will analyze a graph showing the variation of energy imbalance on Earth over the year along different latitudinal zones and answer the questions that follow.

This mini lesson engages students in watching a NASA video related to accumulated dust that makes the trans-Atlantic journey from the Sahara Desert to the Amazon rainforest using NASA's CALIPSO satellite. Students will examine a model and answer questions related to dust transport and the introduction of phosphorus to the soils of the Amazon.

Students review the NASA video showing biosphere data over the North Atlantic Ocean as a time series animation displaying a decade of phytoplankton blooms and answer questions.