Data-Enhanced Investigations for Climate Change Education (DICCE)
With support from the National Science Foundation, EDC is working with SRI International and NASA in the development and piloting of interactive websites for high school classroom climate-change investigations. The websites allow high school students and teachers to assemble customized datasets about local and global climate change from NASA remotely sensed Earth observation mission data archived in NASA’s Goddard Interactive Online Visualization and Analysis Infrastructure (GIOVANNI). GIOVANNI (DICCE-G) is a powerful portal of Earth observation data that provides access to numerous data products on Earth system phenomena covering land biosphere, physical land, ocean biosphere, physical ocean, physical atmosphere, atmospheric gases, and energy and radiation system. Teachers and students can query the GIOVANNI data archive, and then save the results as map images, time series plots, vertical profiles, and data tables. The project has also produced DICCE-Learning Environment (DICCE-LE), a tool for teachers to author and adapt student data investigation activities and presentations around visualizations they make available to their students via DICCE-G. Supports are provided to students and teachers about how to interpret trends in data products of their choice at the regional level and a schema has been developed to help them understand how those data products fit into current scientific thinking about the certainties and uncertainties of global warming.