NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

Data in the Classroom has structured, student-directed lesson plans that use historical and real-time NOAA data. The five modules address research questions and include stepped levels of engagement with complex inquiry investigations with real-time and past data.

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.

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.

Shocking! Within this cluster of storms, a single lightning bolt captured by NOAA satellites was recently certified by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as the world’s longest flash on record. The horizontal distance of the bolt stretched 477 miles, from the central coast of Texas to southern Mississippi, when it flashed on April 29, 2020.

This resource collection from NOAA Education explores the science behind El Niño and La Niña and how these phenomena impact our weather and our lives. By influencing global temperatures and precipitation, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) significantly impacts Earth’s ecosystems and human societies. El Niño and La Niña are opposite extremes of the ENSO, which refers to cyclical environmental conditions that occur across the Equatorial Pacific Ocean. These changes are due to natural interactions between the ocean and atmosphere. Sea surface temperature, rainfall, air pressure, atmospheric and ocean circulation all influence each other. 

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.

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.

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.

GOES-T will track destructive wildfires, lightning, Pacific Ocean-based storms, dense fog, and other hazards that threaten the U.S. West Coast, Hawaii and Alaska. It will also monitor solar activity and space weather to provide early warnings of disruptions to power grids, communications and navigation systems. 

NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) has transitioned a new computer model into operations to increase its understanding of space weather events and improve space weather forecasting capabilities. These advances will help forecasters provide better information to the public about potential impacts from a solar storm and help mitigation actions across economic sectors, including communications, satellite and airline operations, human space flight, and navigation and surveying.