Students analyze the relationship between sea surface height and ocean surface currents by graphing sea height using satellite data.  Note: This lesson is modified from NASA's TOPEX/Poseidon lesson plan.

Exploring salinity patterns is a great way to better understand the relationships between the water cycle, ocean circulation, and climate. In this mini lesson, students analyze sea surface salinity mapped plots created from the Earth System Data Explorer, paired with questions (and answers) from the Aquarius Mission. Credit: Aquarius Education

This mini-lesson guides students' observations of soil moisture anomalies (how much the moisture content was above or below the norm) for the continental US in May 2018.

Students will examine a 2014-2015 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event to identify relationships among sea surface height, sea surface temperature, precipitation, and wind vectors.

The Earth System Satellite Images help students observe and analyze global Earth and environmental data, understand the relationship among different environmental variables, and explore how the data change seasonally and over longer timescales.  

In this activity, students explore three indicators of drought are: soil moisture, lack of precipitation, and decreased streamflows. Students investigate each of these parameters develop a sense for the effects of drought on land.

The El Niño Implementation Sequence provides a series of lessons and activities for students to learn about a condition that sometimes occurs in the Pacific Ocean, but it is so big that it affects weather all over the world.

Test your knowledge of sea level rise and its effect on global populations.

This learning activity uses data acquired by the TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter, a joint project of NASA and the French Space Agency, to investigate the relationship between the topography of a sea-floor feature and the topography of the overlying sea surface.

In this activity, students use satellite images from the NASA Landsat team to quantify changes in glacier cover over time from 1986 to 2018.