CLEAN: The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network supports educators in building climate literacy as outlined in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program framework, “Essential Principles of Climate Literacy” by providing a collection of educational resources that facilitate learning about climate issues. The CLEAN collection is a free online database of ~1,000 free, peer-reviewed, and ready-to-use educational resources for teaching elementary, middle, high school, and undergraduate students about climate and energy. The collection contains activities, demonstrations, experiments, visualizations, and videos—everything you need to create data-rich and authentic lessons on climate and energy. Climate and energy topics include the climate system, causes of climate change, measuring and modeling climate, impacts of climate change, human responses and solutions to climate change, energy use, mental health, environmental justice, and many more. Resources are rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and pedagogic relevancy, making the CLEAN collection of high enough quality to steward the NOAA Teaching Climate database.
In this activity, students explore how the timing of color change and leaf drop of New England's deciduous trees is changing.
This short video describes how the compression of Antarctic snow into ice captures air from past atmospheres. It shows how ice cores are drilled from the Antarctic ice and prepared for shipment and subsequent analysis.
This map shows how much electrical power is produced from wind in each state from 1999 through 2010. The animation shows a general increase in the amount of wind power produced per state and the number of states producing it.
This is a basic animation/simulation with background information about the greenhouse effect by DAMOCLES. The animation has several layers to it that allow users to drill into more detail about the natural greenhouse effect and different aspects of it, including volcanic aerosols and human impacts from burning fossil fuels.
This series of visualizations show the annual Arctic sea ice minimum from 1979 to 2015. The decrease in Arctic sea ice over time is shown in an animation and a graph plotted simultaneously, but can be parsed so that the change in sea ice area can be shown without the graph.
This short video examines the recent melting ice shelves in the Antarctica Peninsula; the potential collapse of West Antarctic ice shelf; and how global sea levels, coastal cities, and beaches would be affected.
This activity is part of the Antarctica's Climate Secrets flexhibit. Students learn about and create models of glaciers and ice sheets, ice shelves, icebergs and sea ice.
This short video from NASA discusses the role that salinity plays in Earth's climate and ocean circulation, focusing on the observations of the Aquarius satellite.
This lesson sequence guides students to learn about the geography and the unique characteristics of the Arctic, including vegetation, and people who live there. Students use Google Earth to explore the Arctic and learn about meteorological observations in the Arctic, including collecting their own data in hands-on experiments. This is the first part of a three-part curriculum about Arctic climate.
In this jigsaw activity, students explore meteorological data collected from Eureka, Canada to try to decide when would be the best time for an Arctic visit.
This video uses film of the Arctic and Arctic researchers as well as animations to discuss feedbacks in the Arctic climate system related to sea ice, the ocean, and clouds. It explains concepts such as albedo and positive and negative feedbacks. The narrative includes discussion of current research and a summary which explains why understanding feedbacks is important.
This video, along with a background essay, focuses on impacts of climate change on the lives of Native Alaskans around Barrow, Alaska. Specific changes include the timing of the changes in the formation and breakout of sea ice and the impacts on subsistence living.
This video provides an overview of changes happening in the Arctic.
This animation shows the Arctic sea ice September (minimum) extents from 1979-2016. Accessible from http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/sea_ice.html
This visualization shows static and animated images of changes in Arctic sea ice 1984-2016.
In this short video, host Dr. Ryan interviews graduate student Amy Steiker at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research about her research, using isotopes of nitrous oxide, connecting human activity to greenhouse gas emissions.
This activity engages students in learning about ways to become energy efficient consumers. Students examine how different countries and regions around the world use energy over time, as reflected in night light levels. They then track their own energy use, identify ways to reduce their individual energy consumption, and explore how community choices impact the carbon footprint.
In this hands-on engineering activity, students will build a tabletop wind turbine. Students get acquainted with the basics of wind energy and power production by fabricating and testing various blade designs for table-top windmills constructed from one-inch PVC pipe and balsa wood (or recycled materials). The activity includes lots of good media and Web resources supporting the science content.
In this activity, students explore the web-based U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Atlas to learn about projected climate changes in their state and how suitable habitat for tree and bird species is projected to change by 2100.
These graphs show carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The graphs display recent measurements as well as historical long term measurements. The related website summarizes in graphs the recent monthly CO2, the full CO2 Record, the annual Mean CO2 Growth Rate, and gives links to detailed CO2 data for this location, which is one of the most important CO2 tracking sites in the world.