This lesson contains a card sort activity that challenges students to predict relative albedo values of common surfaces. 

 Air, Water, Land, & Life: A Global Perspective

Students construct explanations about Earth’s energy budget by connecting a model with observations from side-by-side animations of the monthly mapped data showing incoming and outgoing shortwave radiation from Earth’s surface.

The Earth System Satellite Images, along with the Data Literacy Cubes, help the learner visualize how different Earth system variables change over time, establish cause and effect relationships, identify patterns, and determine relationships among variables.  

Guided by the 5E model, this lesson allows students to work together to uncover how changes in sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are connected to Earth’s energy budget.

The Earth System Satellite Images, along with the Data Literacy Cubes, helps the learner identify patterns in a specific image.  

Students review a video showing a global view of the top-of-atmosphere shortwave radiation from January 26 and 27, 2012 and answer the questions that follow.

Students will practice the process of making claims, collecting evidence to support claims, and applying scientific reasoning to connect evidence to claims.

Scientific data are often represented by assigning ranges of numbers to specific colors. The colors are then used to make false color images which allow us to see patterns more easily. Students will make a false-color image using a set of numbers.

Students will watch and examine a NASA animation of Earth’s rising surface temperatures over an almost 150 year period.