Students will analyze and interpret maps of the average net atmospheric radiation to compare the flow of energy from the Sun toward Earth in different months and for cloudy versus clear days. Students will draw conclusions and support them with evidence.

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.

Dr. Stackhouse uses satellite observations of the Earth-atmosphere system from multiple sources to study Earth’s global energy cycle, especially the processes that cause variability from global to regional scales. Dr. Stackhouse also develops new data products and data systems to help analyze these processes and more efficiently understand and use renewable energy sources.

Students explore the spatial patterns observed in meteorological data and learn how this information is used to predict weather and understand climate behavior.

Students analyze the stability and change of sea level after watching a visualization of sea level height around the world. 

Dr. Wickland works at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where she oversees the planning and implementation of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program and leads its Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area. She coordinates research programs in land cover and land use change, ocean biogeochemistry, terrestrial ecology, and biodiversity. 

Explore and connect to hydrosphere protocols in GLOBE. Each protocol has related Earth System Data Explorer datasets identified as well.

Explore using units in calculations with the Leaf Area Index (LAI). LAI is a ratio that describes the number of square meters of leaves per square meter of available land surface. Because of the units in the ratio, it is dimensionless.

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

Explore using units for calculations with Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). NDVI is a ratio of different light wavelength reflectance which can be used to map the density of green vegetation.