Students watch a video explaining albedo and its impact on Earth. The video shows visualizations of albedo across Earth and how it can change. Students will interpret the images in the video and answer questions about albedo.

Students will analyze a pie chart (circle graph) showing the distribution of different parts of the Earth system's absorption and reflection of energy. 

Students connect day/night and seasonal cycles with albedo in the Arctic region. 

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. 

In this activity, students will learn about sea ice and land ice. They will observe ice melting on a solid surface near a body of water and ice melting in a body of water.

The My NASA Data visualization tool, Earth System Data Explorer (ESDE), helps learners visualize complex Earth System data sets over space and time. Visit this page to review the datasets we have available to you and their organization by Earth System sphere, science variable, dataset name, and start/end dates. 

NASA Worldview is a free online visualization tool that is a great launchpad for learners who are new (or veteran) users of satellite data.

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

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

Earth is a system of systems.