Dr. Norman Loeb, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is the principal investigator for an experiment called the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES). CERES instruments measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back to space and how much thermal energy is emitted by Earth to space.

This lesson is designed to help students analyze the interaction between different cloud heights and Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. 

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

My NASA Data has recently released several new resources, StoryMaps, for use in educational settings.

Explore and connect to the GLOBE Urban protocol bundle. 

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

Explore and connect to the GLOBE Oceans protocol bundle. 

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.

Explore and connect to GLOBE protocol bundles. Each bundle has related Earth System Data Explorer datasets identified.

Phytoplankton distribution background information.