American Museum of Natural History: Climate Change

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

• Teaching Tips
  Educators can use these resources to provide an overview of recent global weather events and the current state of earth's climate. Climate terms, events, and comparisons to weather are not differentiated on some visuals but the instructor can develop lessons that use these tools to help students learn climate concepts. Students can research news articles or related videos or images about specific storm events, adding another dimension to the visualizations.
• About the Science
  These images come from combining images from the five weather satellites that observe the Earth and its atmosphere every half-hour. These are weather events from recent years and may or may not be attributed directly to human influence on the climate system. Nonetheless, these events can be used to help illustrate variability and impacts of climate on society. Comments from expert scientist: This module covers a wide range of weather events from space.
• About the Pedagogy
  The animations and videos present a compelling way to visualize the dynamics of Earth's atmosphere over recent years.
• Technical Details/Ease of Use
  Great technical quality, although the quality of the stream may vary on bandwidth and traffic. The interface is easy to use. Layers (e.g., highlighted events, border and the part of the globe not covered by the satellites) can be turned off and on. Based on our periodic reviews, it appears that this resource gets updated with current data and events (as of 2024).