Use the Data Literacy Cube to guide students’ exploration of mapped data of the Earth System to enrich their observations and inferences.  This is a flexible resource that may be used with a variety of mapped images.  This activity requires a map of Earth data for students to evalu

Hands-on demonstration of the El Niño Effect, trade winds, and upwelling provided by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

Students identify patterns in chlorophyll concentration data to formulate their explanations of phytoplankton distribution. 

Students will identify and describe the relationship between watersheds and phytoplankton distribution. 

For over 20 years, satellite instruments have measured the sea surface height of our ever-changing oceans.  This video of images shows the complicated patterns of rising and falling ocean levels across the globe from 1993 to 2015.

Students will analyze the monthly seasonal chlorophyll concentration images in our global oceans for the four different months of 2017, and then answer the following questions.

This mini-lesson guides students' observations of soil moisture anomalies (how much the moisture content was above or below the norm) for the continental US in May 2018.

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.

NASA visualizers take data – numbers, codes – and turn them into animations people can see and quickly understand.

Students will use coloring sheets to create a color coded model of El Niño, then make comparisons using the actual model by answering questions. If the Data Literacy Map Cube is used with this, students will color their models first.