EVALUATING THE CLIMATE TIME LINE INFORMATION TOOL

A recent National Science Foundation study found that while nearly 80% of those surveyed believed in global warming, some 70% lacked an understanding of basic scientific processes and only just over 50% knew that it took the Earth a year to orbit the sun. The Climate Time Line Information Tool or CTL (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl) has been proto-typed as a potential tool for conveying basic climate processes and their human dimension for diverse audiences. Using a powers of ten approach to temporal scaling, the CTL website was developed through a CIRES Innovative Research Grant by Mark McCaffrey and Dan Kowal at the National Geophysical Data Center. It has recently been evaluated for its potential as an interdisciplinary tool for conveying information about weather and climate processes, such as the diurnal, annual and orbital cycles, ENSO and other oscillations, as well as correlating climate change with human development over the past 100,000 years. Results of the evaluation, including issues of instructional design, will be discussed.