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

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.

This NASA visualization shows sea surface salinity observations (September 2011-September 2014). Students review the video and answer questions.

What is El Nino or ENSO?

Since 1997 I have been the Physical Oceanography Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters AND I am a dedicated sea-going oceanographer.  It stills feels kind of crazy what comes around in life.  I write my short career biography here for students who may consider working in oceanography or for NASA or both.

In this activity, you will use an inexpensive spectrophotometer* to test how light at different visible wavelengths (blue, green, red) is transmitted, or absorbed, through four different colored water samples.

Background information on the El Nino Southern Oscillation or ENSO.

In this interview, Dr. George Huffman calls himself a classic weather person, in part because by the fourth grade in North Central Ohio, he already was excited about the prospect of a job studying weather. At the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Huffman focuses on global rainfall, mostly from satellite, though he says he’ll shamelessly use gauge analysis when necessary. 

This StoryMap lesson plan allows students to explore ocean circulation patterns as they relate to the world's ocean garbage patches using NASA ocean currents data. Students will investigate the forces that contribute to ocean circulation patterns, and how debris, especially plastics, travel from land to the garbage patches. 

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.