NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

This guide includes eight elementary-level lessons, inspired by topics from the IMAX film Ocean Odyssey. Watching the film is not required for these lessons, but may enhance students’ learning experience of the topics presented in the activities. Educators can view a special extended preview offsite link of the film. Understanding the ocean and its ecosystems is essential to comprehending and protecting this planet. We must all be stewards for a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable ocean. The activities in this guide will help lead you and your students to learn more about our ocean planet, its myriad of wonders beneath the waves, and work to maintain healthy ecosystems that are resilient in the face of change.

A spherical projection is the best way to view Earth data, simply because Earth is a sphere! When you attempt to make a map of the world flat, certain locations become distorted, appearing bigger or smaller than they actually are. This hands-on activity allows you to explore the idea of Earth data and the difficulty associated with flat maps, and to enjoy the process of making a little globe. Several of Science On a Sphere’s most popular and important datasets are available for printing.

Watch. Explore. Discover. View the beauty and mystery of the ocean realm captured on video around the globe. Videos are organized into collections to help educators.

The Deep Ocean Education Project is a collaboration among NOAA Ocean Exploration, Ocean Exploration Trust, and Schmidt Ocean Institute featuring high-quality ocean exploration and science education materials from the three organizations. The Deep Ocean Education Project website – launched in 2021 – is built around themes that are easily searchable, address key ocean-related phenomena, and encourage and support three-dimensional approaches to teaching and learning for K-12 education. The objective is to provide a one-stop resource hub for public, educators, and students looking for deep-sea educational materials. The website also includes information on how to connect with research vessels, including a list of upcoming events and opportunities, and live feeds of expeditions.

SOS Explorer® (SOSx) is a flat screen version of the widely popular Science On a Sphere® (SOS). The revolutionary software takes SOS datasets, usually only seen on a 6-foot sphere in large museum spaces, and makes them more accessible. The visualizations show information provided by satellites, ground observations and computer models.

Learn all about the incredible staff who work for NOAA Research! This page provides dozens of career profiles from many fields within NOAA.

This resource collection from NOAA Education explores how NOAA collects climate data from the atmosphere, land, ocean, and space. Some say that climate is what you expect and weather is what you get. More formally, climate is the long-term average of temperature, precipitation, and other weather variables at a given location. Every 30 years, climate scientists calculate new averages. The normal high and low temperatures reported on your local weather forecast come from these 30-year averages. Although climate describes conditions in the atmosphere (hot/cold, wet/dry), these conditions are influenced by the ocean, land, sun, and atmospheric chemistry. NOAA monitors these factors to understand and predict changes to local or global climate.

Meteorologists at NOAA’s National Weather Service have always monitored the conditions of the atmosphere that impact the weather, but over time the equipment they use has changed. As technology advanced, our scientists began to use more efficient equipment to collect and use additional data. These technological advances enable our meteorologists to make better predictions faster than ever before.

Keeping our marine transportation system functioning in a way that is safe and efficient requires information about water depth; mapping the shape of the seafloor, lakebed, or coastline; pinpointing the location of possible obstructions; and understanding many other physical features of water bodies. Hydrography is the science behind this information, and surveying is a primary method of obtaining hydrographic data. In this episode, we learn about surveying and NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson's survey missions in the Great Lakes.

Ever since Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 2000 as the first national marine sanctuary in the Great Lakes, staff and partners have undertaken several expeditions to search for shipwrecks, and have even discovered some that were lost for decades. Probably one of the most notable discoveries within the sanctuary since designation is that of the steamer Choctaw (1892-1915) and wooden bulk freighter Ohio (1873-1894) in historic shipping lanes off Presque Isle, Michigan in Lake Huron.