ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION BUDGETS AND CLIMATE: AN ADAPTED AND UPDATED LAB ACTIVITY TO TEACH ABOUT CLIMATE

Geology/Astronomy 106L is a two-hour Earth and space science lab taught to pre-service elementary teachers at Iowa State University. It complements a two-credit online course taught by two science faculty and is taught by geology graduate teaching assistants. Each semester the lab enrolls ~85 students divided into four sections.

The main activity of one lab period taught in week 12 of the semester is an adaptation of an activity submitted by C. Farmer to the Science Education Research Center (SERC) collection of teaching activities (Poleward Heat Transport Jigsaw, https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/hurricanes/activities/28219.html). The original activity included three low-resolution maps of global incoming solar radiation, absorbed solar radiation, and emitted terrestrial radiation.

The learning objective for this lab is for students to understand how short- and long-wave radiation budgets affect monthly and yearly temperature fluctuations. For this purpose, students create radiation profiles along a particular line of longitude. The coarseness of the original maps made this task challenging so we created new high-resolution maps from ECMWF 40-year reanalysis model data.

Students work in pairs, and are given a map that shows either annual mean incoming solar radiation or annual mean outgoing thermal radiation. Students answer a series of questions about these maps, and then combine with another group in order to compare the differences between incoming and outgoing radiation values. By doing this, they develop an understanding of which parts of the world experience an energy surplus or deficit. Students are then asked to hypothesize why the energy deficit (surplus) areas don’t continue to get colder (warmer).

This lab also includes a short activity where students use an infrared camera to measure the temperature of various objects, including both hot (a lit candle) and cold (ice) items. This helps them to understand that almost everything on Earth emits radiation.