Spur-of-the-Moment Snowflake Lesson

Snowflake taken on black paper with Ollo-Clip lens on iPhone.

Take your students outside while it's snowing BIG FLAKES!

Give each student a piece of black construction paper and a hand lens.
They'll also need a clipboard with a piece of white paper and a pencil.
Wave black paper in the air to cool it down to the outside temperature.
Lay flat on ground or bench, even teacher's cars!
Watch while SNOWFLAKES collect on paper.
Start sketching SNOWFLAKES!

When inside, give each student a piece of colored chalk and have them draw on large paper or the black board if you have one, whiteboard with colored markers, otherwise.

Take time to admire each sketch, challenge those without the six-stem structure, and take photos of all the beautiful SNOWFLAKES!

Great lesson!

Hurricane Irene heads for the United States coastline

Aug 26 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Friday warned Americans to take Hurricane Irene seriously and urged them to obey orders to evacuate from the path of what is likely to be an "extremely dangerous and costly" storm.

"All indications point to this being a historic hurricane," Obama said in a statement to reporters from the farm where he is vacationing on this island off the Boston coast.

Fifty-five million people are potentially in Hurricane Irene's path, from the Carolinas to Cape Cod on the U.S. East Coast, and tens of thousands are evacuating as cities including New York brace for the powerful storm to hit.

*****************************

Track Hurricane Irene with your students! 

Use this graph: http://tinyurl.com/3u9375a 

and this site for the data: http://tinyurl.com/4xu452m. (Put cursor over dot for coordinates.)

Or try this:

Hurricane Student Booklet from NOAA.

New Melt Record for Greenland Ice Sheet

The video shows the same meltwater area in 2009 and 2010. Very dramatic difference!

Click here for more details.

Cyclone Yasi Hits Australia

Share with your students the power of a Category 5 Hurricane. Also a good time to share the different terminology: Cyclone not Hurricane, and its opposite rotation in the southern hemisphere.

Reading Ice Core Lesson Plans

Here's a wonderful lesson plan where the teacher makes simulated ice core samples for the students to study:

Frozen in Time: Ice Cores by Jan French


Click here for the Pdf lesson, complete with ice core instructions and student worksheet.



Click here for PBS "Stories in the Ice."



Click here for National Ice Core Laboratory.



Click here for another Pdf lesson in which the students model their own ice cores using play dough and other substances. Then their cores are exchanges and studied. Very kewl!



Click here for a nice "movie" of the life of a snowflake, showing how a glacier forms in layers from snow. Click here for accompanying lesson.

Reading Iceland Ice Cores

An interview with Vasilii Petrenko, who is working in Greenland where cores are being taken from the Greenland ice sheet. They are studying trapped air in the ice to learn about its composition--especially its CO2 content and the clues that it might provide about climate change.

Hurricane Ida

Hurricane Ida has been bearing down on the southern United States through the Gulf of Mexico. It has currently been downgraded to a Tropical Storm, and it's hoped it will bring only rain to the projected area.

Here's a great link with many visuals to show your students!

Click here for blank chart of the Atlantic Basin.

Weather.com has a nice video center.

Human Impact on Climate

Arctic Lake Sediments Yield 200,000 Years of Climate Change Data
Analysis Supports a Human Impact on Climate

"The possibility that climate change might simply be a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time is dimming, according to evidence in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published in October, 2009."

Click here for details.

Georgia Flooding Photos

It is not every day a major Interstate highway gets closed by flooding in Georgia. Interstate 20 was closed west of Atlanta for around two days because of Sweetwater Creek flowing over it.

Click here to see many more photos!

Southeastern US Rainfall

Southeastern Rainfall Map for September 14–21, 2009





"Several storms over the southeastern United States left behind acres of standing water and multiple deaths in September 2009. The governor of Georgia declared a state of emergency in the state’s 17 counties hardest hit by the floods, CNN reported. Deaths in Georgia alone totaled 7 by the morning of September 22, 2009, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution."

Have your students contrast the above map to this Average Rainfall Map:



The TRICK is that there are different units on each map! See if any of your students catch that! If not, hint that they need to look closer! Provide them with a conversion factor: 1 mm = 0.039 inches.

Then have them add the inches to the mm SE US Rainfall Map. Example: 300 mm = 11.8 mm. Then how much different is the one map from the other?

AH-HA! The bottom map shows a yearly average! See if any of your students catches that. If not, hint that there is still something wrong! Perhaps look for a monthly average chart online? Divide the total by 12 for average monthly?

BUT look closely at the title! This is only for one week! What is the usual/average/typical rainfall for one week? How can we find that? NOW can you contrast the maps???



WHAT FUN it is to teach your students to THINK!

Greenland's Melting Glaciers

Visit Greenland through this CNN video to learn about how Greenland’s glaciers are rapidly melting and contributing to sea level rise.

LA County Wild Fires as viewed from Satellite

Wildfires burned north of the city of Los Angeles County on August 29, 2009. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image around 2:20 p.m. local time (21:20 UTC) the same day. Red outlines show hotspots where MODIS detected high surface temperatures associated with fires, and the hotspots roughly correspond with fires described by California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. A department bulletin, issued August 30, 2009, stated that the Station fire was 5 percent contained, affected 35,200 acres, had destroyed 3 residences, and threatened 10,000 more. As of August 30, the Morris fire, affecting 2,168 acres, was 95 percent contained.

Tracking Hurricane Jimena

Every Earth Science teacher should have their students track a hurricane a few times in their career. Especially one poised to hit the North American continent. The following links will get you started. Basically you need a source for the location of Jimena as it nears the Baja California peninsula and you need a map for them to plot its course.

Click here for a blank tracking map. You might have them draw in a few more lat/long lines.

Go here for the locations to map. Click on various dates and times. Location is usually near the top. Lots of other interesting facts such as wind speed, etc.



Here's the path so far:

HURRICANE JIMENA PATH

FRI AUG 28 2009
AT 800 PM PDT...0300 UTC...THE CENTER OF TROPICAL DEPRESSION
THIRTEEN-E WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 13.8 NORTH...LONGITUDE
101.9 WEST

Saturday August 29, 2009
1: 0300 UTC TROPICAL DEPRESSION CENTER LOCATED NEAR 13.8N 101.9W
2: 0900 UTC TROPICAL STORM CENTER LOCATED NEAR 14.1N 102.3W
3: 1300 UTC TROPICAL STORM CENTER LOCATED NEAR 14.2N 102.8W
4: 1500 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 14.3N 103.2W
5: 2100 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 15.1N 104.2W

Sunday August 30, 2009
6: 0300 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 15.8N 105.1W
7: 0900 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 16.0N 105.7W
8: 1500 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 16.3N 106.3W
9: 2100 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 16.6N 106.8W

Monday August 31, 2009
10: 0300 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 17.0N 107.2W
11: 0900 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 17.5N 107.9W
12: 1500 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 18.0N 108.3W
13: 2100 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 18.5N 109.2W

Tuesday September 1, 2009
14: 0300 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 19.4N 109.6W
15: 0900 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 20.2N 110.1W
16: 1500 UTC HURRICANE CENTER LOCATED NEAR 21.0N 110.7W

Dramatic Climate Change Temperature Map

Click here for details.

Research suggests winds dying down across US

"The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming — the very problem wind power seeks to address."

Click here for details on this story.

VORTEX2 Finally Catches a Tornado

Vortex2 finally catches a tornado after four weeks on the road!

A Car that runs on AIR??!!

Are you kidding me? How fun is this?!

Visit site based in France and watch kewl video!

Hurricanes - Disturbing New Trend

Hurricanes aren't where they should be.

NSF Website on Climate Change

Climate Change is being added to school district or state science benchmarks across the nation. The National Science Foundation website is a good place to start.

Click here to begin.

Click here to download their Climate Change Report.

VORTEX2 Videos!!!

FINALLY! Found a good source of videos on VORTEX2!! I can't embed them, but here's a link. They have several GREAT videos. These are through the Weather Channel over at Truveo. Check it out!

NOTE: Be sure to scroll down the list of videos. There are tons more than you think!