[Grad-postdoc-assn] [Fwd: [Proflist] Request for classroom research topics related to climate change and GIS]

[Paula Fisher]

This may be of interest to some of you

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[Proflist] Request for classroom research topics related to
climate change and GIS
Date: 	Fri, 20 Apr 2007 14:58:58 -0600
From: 	Michelle Flores <michelle at ucar.edu>
Reply-To: 	michelle at ucar.edu
Organization: 	UCAR
To: 	proflist at ucar.edu



The NCAR GIS and Climate Change Working Groups will soon be
participating in a NSF workshop to create small, guided, data-enhanced
educational resources.  The goal is to help teachers and students to
investigate real science questions in a classroom by downloading and
analyzing actual science data from the same online data portals used by
scientists around the world.

In this case, the project will call on the IPCC climate change scenario
data that were run at NCAR and that are being distributed in GIS format
(shapefile) from NCAR’s GIS Climate Change portal
(http://www.gisClimateChange.org). The data are plausible alternative
futures under particular assumptions about fossil-fuel use and other
human activities. A wide range of variables are examined, including
temperature, precipitation flux, snowfall flux, and moisture content
(the portal has a complete list). Through GIS, a variety of
socioeconomic variables such as population, land use, and soils can be
overlaid, allowing users to study the impacts on these variables based
on climate-change scenarios.

The workshop organizers would like to use research topics of specific
interest to faculty at UCAR member institutions.  If you have (or if you
know of a colleague who might have) a research topic or question
involving climate change and GIS systems that you would find useful in
your classroom, please send a complete description of the topic and how
it fits into the larger context of the course that you were teaching to
Lawrence Buja (see below) or Jennifer Boehnert (boehnert at ucar.edu,
303-497-2858).  Thank you for your interest.

Contact:  Lawrence Buja, NCAR/ESSL/CGD
303-497-2858, southern at ucar.edu
Examples of data-enhanced activities:
http://serc.carleton.edu/usingdata/activities.html