Acronyms Site Map

During the Climate Connections workshop, educators work directly with JPL scientists and engineers to discover how NASA Earth-observing satellites and aircraft provide data on ocean circulation, the water cycle, and climate issues such as sea level rise. The workshop features NASA's Aquarius, AirMOSS, GRACE, and Jason-3 missions.

The goal of the Climate Connections workshop is to provide teachers with information from Earth Science missions, along with an opportunity to learn hands-on activities and gather resources for use in the classroom. The workshop's content is chosen to help educator audiences gain a better understanding of real-world applications in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

August 7-8, 2015
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

Thirty three middle and high school educators attended this workshop. On the first day, the participants heard from Aquarius, AirMOSS, GRACE, and Jason-3 mission specialists about current research efforts through a series of concept map presentations. The educators then had the opportunity to speak with each of the presenters over lunch to ask questions about the content of their research or to get a better understanding of their science.

On Day 2, the educators engaged in a series of hands-on activities (see Resources, below), and created a "Personal Plan of Action" to help bring newly learned content into their classrooms.

Water can be found in three phases on Earth: gas, liquid, and solid (ice). When heat energy is added from the sun, phase changes may occur. Understanding basic water properties is fundamental to studying the global water cycle.

This concept map shows the location and quantity of water stored on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere. It also traces how water fluxes between these major reservoirs. Various forms of water such as a sea ice, soil moisture, groundwater, and land ice are also included.

Tracking the movement of heat, water, and salt across the globe contributes to our understanding of the earth system. This map highlights human-relevant processes such as ocean circulation, El Niño/La Niña events, sea level rise, and fresh water resources.

Earth-observing satellites can detect the lateral movement of seawater while inferring its vertical motion. Examples from a NASA field experiment show how in situ and computer model data were used synergistically with satellite-based measurements to study the saltiest part of the North Atlantic Ocean.

This map outlines how satellite and airborne instruments monitor elements of Earth's water cycle. Surface properties such as sea level, roughness, salinity, and soil moisture are measured using altimeters, scatterometers, radar, and/or radiometers.

Dr. Duan received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. She is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California and works on the AirMOSS project. Her research interests include forward and inverse modeling of electromagnetic scattering from layered rough surfaces with or without buried objects, radar system design and radar measurements of vegetation and ground variables.

Mark Fujishin manages JPL's Earth Science Missions office. He oversees operations for Earth Science instrument and satellite projects, along with the on-site Earth Science Mission Center facility.

Dr. Gardner is a Research Scientist in the Solid Earth Group (Earth Sciences Section). He studies the Earth's cryosphere (frozen Earth) with a particular focus on glaciers and their impacts on sea level rise and water resources. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta.

Dr. Lee received his Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of Rhode Island and is the Project Scientist for the Aquarius/SAC-D Satellite mission. His research interests include ocean circulation and its relation to climate variability on seasonal-to-decadal time scales (in particular, upper-ocean heat & salt balance; meridional transports; inter-basin linkages; tropical-extratropical exchanges); data assimilation; and adjoint sensitivity analysis.

Dr. Reager is a research scientist in the JPL Water and Carbon Cycles Group. He uses GRACE observations of water movement to study flood and drought occurrences and to measure the strength of the global water cycle. He received his Ph.D. in Earth System Science from the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Tabatabaeenejad received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He is a Research Assistant Professor in the University of Southern California's Department of Electrical Engineering - Electrophysics and the Lead Investigator on the AirMOSS Root-Zone Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm Team. His research interests include microwave remote sensing, applied and computational electromagnetics, and applied and computational mathematics.

Dr. Vázquez is the NASA Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) scientist for sea surface temperature (SST) and sea surface salinity. He also serves as the chair of the Applications and User Services Technical Advisory Group for high-resolution SST. He received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from the University of Southern California. His research interests include validation of satellite-derived sea surface temperature data sets; development and analysis of climate data records; statistical modeling of remote sensing data; and improvement in quality of sea surface temperature data records.

Dr. Zlotnicki is Manager (Act.) and Deputy Section Manager in the Climate, Oceans and Solid Earth Sciences at JPL. He received his Ph.D. in Oceanography (Marine Geophysics) from Massachussetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His research interests include separation of geophysical from ocean circulation signals in satellite altimetry; GRACE gravimetry; and the processing, management and effective delivery of large satellite data streams.

The student will perform an experiment to learn that melting land-based ice contributes to greater sea-level rise than melting seal.

Students will explore how satellite altimeters work by constructing and mapping “ocean topography” in a closed box.

This activity compares salt and fresh water, demonstrating that fluids arrange into layers according to their densities.

This online game is suitable for play both within and outside of the classroom. On the reverse, there are black and white educational activities designed to be reproduced directly from the poster for use in the classroom.

Hands-on activity in which students collect a soil moisture sample of the top 5 cm of soil for comparison with Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite observations. Click here for the data sheet (PDF, 123 KB).