NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

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 the major systems that drive global weather. Imagine our weather if Earth were completely motionless, had a flat dry landscape and an untilted axis. This of course is not the case; if it were, the weather would be very different. The local weather that impacts our daily lives results from large global patterns in the atmosphere caused by the interactions of solar radiation, Earth's large ocean, diverse landscapes, and motion in space.

This resource collection from NOAA Education takes you on a trip to the bottom of the ocean, exploring feature and ecosystems and how we study them. Want to climb the tallest mountain on Earth from its base to its peak? First you will need to get into a deep ocean submersible and dive almost 4 miles under the surface of the Pacific Ocean to the sea floor. 

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.

Seamounts represent some of Earth’s tallest peaks, unexplored territories, and critical habitats supporting important fisheries across the globe. Students will apply the phenomenon of upwelling and currents to determine why many seamounts sustain diverse ecological communities and support surprising levels of biological productivity in nearby waters. Students analyze data and various models to evaluate how well they represent patterns of ocean currents around seamounts and determine the effects these current flows have on productivity.

Volcanoes may either never be active enough to break the surface of the ocean or be sufficiently active to break the surface and form an island. The island may also be so heavy that it eventually sinks and forms a seamount. Thousands of these seamounts have been discovered and studied worldwide to help provide evidence of past and current tectonic processes. In this investigation, students analyze Hawaiian and Alaskan seamount/island chain maps and data tables, plus a demonstration to develop an explanation to the phenomenon: How do seamounts and island chains form in the middle of the ocean?

Welcome to a virtual tour of the National Weather Service Forecast Office and Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi!

Learn more about the many applications of environmental data from NOAA and our partners, including how data can be transformed into visualizations to tell a story.

Follow along with NOAA Teachers at Sea as they participate in NOAA research voyages. Teachers and educators spend several weeks on a NOAA Ship and are part of the research crew while on board! Past blogs go back to 2003. Some blog posts are in Spanish.

There’s a saying among climate scientists: What happens in the Arctic doesn’t necessarily stay in the Arctic. That’s especially true when a sudden warming of the polar stratosphere -- the layer of the atmosphere just above the layer where we live -- in winter causes the Arctic jet stream to slow and wobble, spilling frigid air and extreme weather south over North America and Europe, often for weeks at a time.