In this activity students use the Web to explore the energies that influence the ocean such as surface circulation, currents, waves, tides, and vertical motion. They are faced with three problems and are asked to choose one of the three and go on a fact finding mission. They can either answer the question, "What causes waves and why are they different in size and shape?", discuss how waves are both ... Full description.

This text discusses differences in ocean tides. Along America's Atlantic Coast, two high and low tides occur daily. Such tides are called semidiurnal. On the north shore of the Gulf of Mexico, the tide is diurnal, meaning that it moves in and out again once a day while in the Pacific Northwest, there are mixed tides, two highs and two lows a day, characterized by significant disparity between successive ... Full description.

A network of currents called the Great Ocean Conveyor constantly circulates the water in Earth's oceans and redistributes heat from the tropics toward the poles, keeping some regions far more habitable than they would be otherwise. In this audio segment, scientists discuss the hypothesis that global warming is introducing fresh water into the world's oceans, disrupting the Great Ocean Conveyor. These ... Full description.

This on-line expedition focuses on the flow of ocean water along with its climatic impact and environmental consequences. Learning objectives include an awareness that ocean waters are constantly on the move, that ocean currents influence climate and living conditions for plants and animals, even on land, and that currents flow in complex patterns affected by wind, the water's salinity and heat content, ... Full description.

This site contains 23 questions on the topic of atmosphere and oceans, which covers tides, currents, layers of the atmosphere (troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere) and weather. This is part of the Principles of Earth Science course at the University of South Dakota. Users submit their answers and are provided immediate feedback. Full description.

This tool provides a processing system and data center to provide operational ocean surface current information from satellite altimeter and vector wind data. The region of interest is the tropical Pacific Ocean, where this information is expected to be useful for fisheries management and recruitment, monitoring debris drift, larvae drift, oil spills, fronts and eddies, as well as on-going large scale ... Full description.

In this activity students will learn how cold and warm water behave in the marine environment due to convection currents by conducting an experiment that demonstrates the formation of a convection current. They will discover that around the steeply rising sides of some submarine mountains, cold waters from the depths often flow upward, mixing with warmer surface waters to create upwelling due to swiftly ... Full description.

LOCUS is a collaborative site featuring the use of Giovanni, a Web-based data exploration and analysis tool. LOCUS is intended to support the research use of Ocean Color Giovanni, which has data from SeaWiFS and MODIS-Aqua. The site includes several educational modules covering ocean color and sea surface temperature, boundary currents, upwelling and primary productivity, interannual and seasonal ... Full description.

To gather long-term information about the world's oceans and currents, orbiting instruments must take extremely precise measurements of the height of the ocean surface. Ocean surface topography data contains information that has significant practical applications in such areas as the study of worldwide weather and climate patterns, the monitoring of shoreline evolution, and the protection of ocean ... Full description.

This site provides data sets and graphical display tools for viewing and analyzing mean ocean surface current data from the tropical Pacific Ocean. Ocean surface velocity data is collected via satellite and made available to users as latitude/longitude and time series plots. Users can select location range, date range, data type, and plot type to create graphical displays. This resource is part of ... Full description.