Teacher Portal
One of our greatest opportunities for teachers is our Summer Teachers Institute (STI). This is an annual, 3-day program that provides teachers with scientific resources pertaining to local environmental issues. Specifically, environmental changes and extreme weather events in the Pacific Northwest. We’ve planned out for the next years as followed, each year, STI will be themed-based, focusing on our three major ecosystem types impacted by extreme weather and changing climate:
http://www.marine-ed.org/ – National Marine Educators Association
Year 1- Oceans, Sea Level Rise and Acidification
Year 2- Mountains Glaciers and Freshwater
Year 3- Urban Environment, Flooding, and Sea Level Rise
– Climatechangelive.org
A fun web portal put on by the Forest Service that bring webcasts, webinars, and online climate education resources to students and teachers!
– Yale has created an amazing site called the Climate Advocacy Lab, a web-portal with great maps with percentiles of U.S. public opinion on climate issues. It also has a great resource center with loads of free data! The map they have would be a great visual tool for your students and yourself!
– U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit
An amazing webpage that throws you into the action of calculating and assessing climate change. This helps you step by step to analyze a specific aspect of the changing climate. Take a look at some of their tools and check out their videos too!
– Let kids know about Youth Leadership Progra
Grays Harbor College, Mount Rainier Institute, and Mount2Sounds- focused on science, stewardship and service. In this five-week program, 20 local students between the ages of 14-16 will earn a stipend while developing leadership and job skills! Activities will include team building, introduction to marine science and hydrological cycle, ecosystem health indicators, non-point source pollution, micro-plastic, scientific measurements, instruments and sampling, and charts, maps and marine spatial planning! You’ll join NOAA scientists and other local watershed partners and researchers to utilize Grays Harbor Historical Seaport ships and equipment to conduct “real” field research in their own “local” waters. With the professional and leadership skills the students will acquire, they’ll work with Grays Harbor Stream Team, Grays Harbor County Department of Environmental Health to complete Action Projects!
– Action Projects for Community Resiliency
Some of these projects include: water quality monitoring, riparian restoration, measuring stream flow, and implementing the Cool School Challenge (an contest to reduce carbon footprints for schools, churches, and homes).
– A fun tool to share with your students is the Coastal Flooding Resiliency Ideas from NOAA. This page, with the help of some amazing maps, showcases the world in which sea levels continue to rise and the vulnerabilities of our coastal states.
– The Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP) supports interdisciplinary research to advance understanding of how climate variability and change affect key socio-economic sectors, and promotes the application of this new knowledge in climate-related decisions. SARP works with scientists and decision makers (e.g., resource managers and policy leaders) to develop new tools and methodologies that they can incorporate into decision-making scenarios. The goal is to help decision makers better prepare for and respond to climate-related impacts. SARP’s current foci are water resource management initiatives for coping with drought, and extreme event preparedness.
– NOAA’s West Coast Fisheries web-portal is an excellent source for all sorts of regional fish data. The amount of free information available from this site is amazing!
–What is Sea Level Rise? A FAQ from NOAA that answers a few questions about Sea Level Rise, what it is, what it has to do with climate change, what is ‘sea level’ normally, and more.
–Climate Program Office global SLR scenarios – A report that provides a synthesis of sea level rise research and 4 possible sea level rise scenarios for the United States. This page also has a quick Q&A related to the report for background information.
–“Our Home: Earth From Space” – A series from the 1990s of short videos, with a short introduction to each, that covers satellites, El Nino, Global Warming, Drought, and Hurricanes as viewed from space. A great resource for a little fun when learning about these topics!