This site from SERC's Starting Point presents sample Gallery Walk questions about weather and climate. These questions encourage students to examine the effects of weather on transportation, agricultural, forestry, and banking systems. Other questions explore typical temperature and wind direction patterns, cold fronts, warm fronts, climates in relation to latitude, altitude, continentality, weather ... Full description.

This site from SERC's Starting Point presents sample Gallery Walk questions about air pressure and wind. These questions encourage students to examine surface air pressure, temperature, air density, incoming solar radiation, gravity, pressure gradient, Coriolis and friction forces, unequal heating, making wind forecasts, earth's semi-permanent pressure zones, and drawing flow directions and pressure ... Full description.

In this report, the Global Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Climate Research Group examines the possible climate impacts of quadrupling atmospheric CO2. Several impacts are discussed, surface air temperature warming, sea level rise, thermohaline circulation changes, mid-latitude summer drying, heat index and temperature increases and possible changes in tropical storms and El Nino. This site provides a nice ... Full description.

This page contains several visualizations which have been prepared in the course of the Global Fluid Dynamics Laboratory's (GFDL) research. Images cover topics such as hurricanes, global warming, radiative transfer, stratospheric processes, El Nino, cyclones and storms, Jupiter and Mars. Some topics also include animations and detailed descriptions. These are offered as examples of various visualization ... Full description.

Contour Basics is an exercise designed to introduce students to contour plots. The Contour Activity is a great on-line resource that starts slowly and increases in difficulty. It teaches students basic techniques for generating contours, introduces students to the subtleties of generating contour plots with sparse data, provides many opportunities for students to assess their own progress and understanding ... Full description.

In this Plank's Radiation exercise, students use an existing Excel workbook to investigate how spectral irradiance from a blackbody radiator depends on temperature, and to clearly see the connection between Planck's Radiation law, and the Stefan-Boltzman and Wien Radiation laws. Students adjust the solar temperature to get the best fit between observations and the spectral irradiance calculated from ... Full description.

This Stella model allows students to learn about chemical mass balance in the atmosphere and apply this concept to atmospheric chlorofluorocarbon (important for ozone depletion) and carbon dioxide (important for global warming) concentration changes. Students will learn about chemical mass balance of the global atmosphere, understand the relationship between atmospheric life-time, source emission ... Full description.

With this exercise, students use Excel to graph and analyze Vostok ice core data (160,000 years of Ice core data from Vostok Station). Data includes ice age, ice depth, carbon dioxide, methane, dust, and deuterium isotope relative abundance (dD). Students learn about ice cores and what they can tell us about past atmospheric conditions, learn about past atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and CH4 and ... Full description.

Students explore a Global Energy Balance Climate Model Using Stella II. This Stella model focuses on global energy balance and creating a useful climate model. Students can explore how the model planetary surface and atmospheric temperatures respond to variations in solar input, atmospheric and surface albedo, atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide, volcanic eruptions, and mixed layer ocean depth. ... Full description.

The Daisy World model is intended to illustrate a mechanism through which biota might optimize their environment by means of negative feedback. The model offers a very simplified approach to a feedback system and can provide an introductory lesson in how models work. The aim of the model is to implement and test a mathematical model describing possible influence of biota on an abiotic (climatic) system ... Full description.