In this lesson, students will investigate the drivers of climate change, including adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, sea level rise, and the effect of decreasing sea ice on temperatures.

Dr. West is former NASA DEVELOP National Program participant, Center Lead, and current mentor to the program. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in ecology at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University.

Steve Nerem is the leader of NASA’s Sea Level Change team. His project, Observation-Driven Projections of Future Regional Sea Level Change, focuses on using NASA satellite and in situ observations and climate modeling to estimate future regional sea level change.

Visit this link to explore careers in Engineering Technician.

Dr. Tom Loveland is a research geographer at EROS and director of the USGS Land Cover Institute. He has been engaged in research on the use of remote sensing for land use and land cover investigations for over 25 years and has conducted studies that have spanned local to global scales. He was among the first to create continental and global-scale land cover data sets derived from remotely sensed imagery.

This investigation is part of the NASA: Mission Geography Module "What are the causes and consequences of climate change?" that guides students through explorations in climatic variability and evidence for global climate change. 

Ryan Turner says "My career has focused on software and software is ubiquitous, so I have been involved in many different projects. There is a lot of flexibility with software. I’ve worked on projects ranging from real-time displays of sounding rocket trajectories to enterprise messaging software tools for spacecraft operations centers." Read about the role of mentorship in his career.

Learners follow adventurous camper, Awenasa, as she travels the United States and attends various camp locations throughout the year.  Learners analyze data to find her location among the various campsites using monthly averaged NASA satellite data (Cloud Coverage, Surface (S

Learn about Erika Podest's journey from a childhood in Panama to a career at NASA as a Research Scientist. 

Students watch the video Frozen Earth and answer the following questions that discuss how ice helps moderate the planet's temperature using NASA satellites.