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.

Lola Fatoyinbo works at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She witnessed deforestation first-hand when she lived in Benin and Ivory Coast, West Africa. She speaks five languages and loves to travel. She discusses her career journey in this interview.

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. 

Read this interview with Kristopher Bedka to find out more about life as a Senior Research Scientist at NASA.

Learn about the different cloud types and their names. Match cloud photos and names by cloud type and for all types. Evaluate the types of clouds represented in various data displays.

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. 

This StoryMap lesson plan allows students to explore global phytoplankton distribution using chlorophyll concentration data in a 5 E-learning cycle. Students will investigate the processes that allow phytoplankton populations to thrive, as well as how their role in the carbon cycle impacts the other spheres of the Earth System. 

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.