Water: A Zero Sum Game

This video takes viewers high into the Rocky Mountain snowpack, where researchers dig snow pits to explore the source of Colorado's water supply. Highlights how important snowpack is to the supply of fresh water available in western and southwestern states. Snowmelt dynamics are discussed, including the impact of a warming climate on these dynamics.

Baking the Breadbasket: Persistent Drought in the Heartland

In this video, NOAA's Deke Arndt, Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at the National Climatic Data Center, recaps the temperature and precipitation data for the continental US in summer 2012. It describes how these conditions have led to drought and reduced crop yields.

Vanishing Island: Sea Level Rise

This video features interviews with native people living on atoll islands in Micronesia, so viewers are able to understand the real, current threats that these people are facing due to climate change.

Predicting the Effects of Climate Change on Soil Loss

In this activity, students investigate soil erosion and how a changing climate could influence erosion rates in agricultural areas. This activity is part of a larger InTeGrate module called Growing Concern.

Earth's Water Cycle

This NASA video provides a nice overview of Earth's water cycle from the perspective of looking at Earth from space.

Changing Planet: Melting Mountain Glaciers

This NBC Learn video features climate scientists doing their research on Mt. Kilimanjaro to study the climate of the past. The scientists put the recently observed changes on the glacier into perspective by comparing past climate fluctuations, stressing that the current observed rate of change is unprecedented.
Note: you will need to scroll down the Changing Planet video page to get to this video.

The Water Cycle

This visualization, from the US Geological Survey, provides a simple schematic of the various pathways that water can take as it cycles through ocean, lakes, atmosphere, surface and ground.

Snowpack: Decadal Averages Map

This is an interactive map of California and the Sierra Nevada mountains, showing projected variations in water stored in snowpack, from 1950 to 2090, assuming low or high emission scenarios over that period of time. Interactive can be adjusted to show different months of the year and various climate models, graphed by site.

The impact of a global temperature rise of 2C

This poster, viewable online, highlights some of the impacts of a global-average temperature rise of 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial age climate.

Glacier (?) National Park

This activity engages learners in examining data pertaining to the disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park. After calculating percentage change of the number of glaciers from 1850 (150) to 1968 (50) and 2009 (26), students move on to the main glacier-monitoring content of the module--area vs. time data for the Grinnell Glacier, one of 26 glaciers that remain in the park. Using a second-order polynomial (quadratic function) fitted to the data, they extrapolate to estimate when there will be no Grinnell Glacier remaining (illustrating the relevance of the question mark in the title of the module).

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