NOAA View Data Imagery Portal for Educators

The NOAA View Data Imagery Portal was designed with educators in mind!  Here you will find easy access to NOAA data visualizations pertaining to oceans, atmosphere, land, cryosphere and climate. Depending on the data set you select, daily, weekly, monthly and/or yearly visualizations are available. You can adjust the visualization to view as an animation or view a particular date or time period and by clicking the "data values" box, you can obtain quantitative data for a particular area of interest. For each image, a description with background information and links to related resources is available; images can be downloaded as high resolution images or Google Earth files.  A 2 minute video tutorial is available.

The screen shot below is of sea surface temperature for the week of Nov 25, 2013.

Permafrost Lessons and Activities

A variety of lessons and videos that can be used to introduce students to permafrost are available from the the National Snow and Ice Data Center, including: How Permanent is Permafrost? which explores the relationship between surface air temperature and permafrost (soil) temperature using data obtained from boreholes at five locations in Russia; data are provided in Excel spreadsheets and can also be viewed in Google Earth. This lesson is included in the collection of peer-reviewed resources available from the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN); the CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness.


In addition, some lessons provide opportunities for students to create their own permafrost:

Permawhat? by PBS
In this lesson, students identify the contents of permafrost found in the Denali Wilderness of Alaska and create permafrost.

Hot Times in Alaska by Scientific American Frontiers
This lesson provides an introduction to permafrost, the opportunity to create and examine frozen soil, and a hands-on activity where students quantify the effects of frozen soil on water percolation.

NASA's Global Ice Viewer

NASA's Global Ice Viewer enables viewers to see how climate change has affected glaciers, sea ice, and continental ice sheets by focusing on Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica.

Visit Antarctica to learn about the continent's major ice shelves, ice flow and extent of sea ice which is actually increasing!

This is a good time to remind you that you will want to be sure to distinguish between the Antarctic Ice Sheet - glacial ice - which is losing volume and Antarctic sea ice - frozen seawater - which is expanding. Two recent NASA articles may be of interest:

NASA study examines Antarctic sea ice increases

Ice sheet loss at both poles increasing, study finds

A Tour of the Cryosphere: Antarctica

NASA's A Tour of the Cryosphere is an animation that provides an overview of Earth's frozen surfaces using satellite observations and details the impact that recent cryospheric changes are making on our planet.

The 5 minute animation begins in Antarctica, showing some unique features of the Antarctic landscape found nowhere else on earth. Ice shelves, ice streams, glaciers, and the formation of massive icebergs can be seen clearly in the flyover of the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica.

Still images of Antarctica, along with images from the collapse of the Larsen iceshelf are also available for download.

Satellite View of Antarctica

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is the first-ever true-color high-resolution satellite view of the Antarctic continent enabling everyone to see Antarctica as it appears in real life. The primary purpose of the LIMA website is to provide materials that will allow for both students and educators to explore the continent.  The Meet Antarctica page provides an introduction to the continent; fact sheets along with high resolution images are also available for download. 

The Antarctic Mysteries page contains seventeen images (many of which are also available for high resolution download) that depict a variety of Antarctic features, from crevasses to icebergs, and provides a description of each.