[Proflist] Request for classroom research topics related to climate change and GIS

[Michelle Flores]

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
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