Database Provider

Rutgers University

Author

Rutgers University

Grades

6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, AP® / College

Subjects

Science, Social Studies, Biology, Earth and Space Sciences, Geography, Math

Resource Types

Interactive Media
Data

Regional Focus

North America, United States, USA - Northeast, New Jersey

Climate Dashboard

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Synopsis

This interactive resource allows students to explore graphs and maps of New Jersey's historical and projected weather conditions, from 2000 to the year 2100.
There are two different emissions scenarios provided to choose from and there are six different data sets for each season to explore.

Teaching Tips

Positives

This resource is incredibly thorough and contains a plethora of interesting and useful data for students to explore.
The option to toggle between a map or graph will be especially helpful for students who may struggle with math and prefer to learn visually.

Additional Prerequisites

Students should read the descriptions of mean seasonal precipitation, mean daily maximum temperatures, mean daily minimum temperatures, mean cooling degree days, mean growing degree days, and mean heating degree days prior to viewing the data.
Students should be comfortable with charts and graphs.

Differentiation

Cross-curricular connections can be made in health classes that are discussing the effects of extreme heat on people and health, especially in urban areas.
Math classes can use the line graphs with the maximum and minima=um values to support lessons about confidence intervals, averages, and standard deviations.
This resource would work well as a station-rotation, where students explore data from each category at a different computer station, answering a set of questions about each data set.
To make this resource a bit more fun, try setting up a scavenger hunt within the data. The first student or group to correctly find the answers to your questions wins.

Scientist Notes

This resource is a website from Rutgers and the New Jersey Climate Change Resource Center that provides a climate dashboard to help users visualize climate change trends and statistics. The dashboard compares conditions from 2000 to future projections using different models that can be viewed in both map and interactive charts. All of the seasons can be projected with today's global policies. There are additional tabs to view that include data for precipitation, temperature, cooling and heating days, and growing days. This website would be a great resource for a more advanced class discussing climate change and its effects on seasonal temperature and precipitation. The data presented would be great for a classroom discussion about climate change and data analysis.

Standards

This resource addresses the listed standards. To fully meet standards, search for more related resources.

Mathematics

Functions: Interpreting Functions (9-12)
- CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSF.IF.B.6 Calculate and interpret the average rate of change of a function (presented symbolically or as a table) over a specified interval. Estimate the rate of change from a graph.

Science

ESS2: Earth's Systems
- MS-ESS2-5. Collect data to provide evidence for how the motions and complex interactions of air masses result in changes in weather conditions.
- HS-ESS2-2. Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth’s surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems.

ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
- MS-ESS3-2. Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
- MS-ESS3-5. Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
- HS-ESS3-5. Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth’s systems.

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