Understanding Sea Level

Sea level and sea level rise are important topics that impact everyone, particularly the 160 million+ people that live along our nation’s coasts. Investigations of sea level can help your students better understand Earth's natural cycles while investigations of sea level rise can help your students understand how humans are affecting our planet. Sea level, or sea surface height, is also a good topic to study using real data because of the interesting data sets that are available both globally and locally. Satellite data gives a global view, while a network of monitoring stations and buoys provide long-term data at specific locations around the United States. Studying sea level also provides good linkages with middle school mathematics and science standards. Charts of sea surface height data are excellent examples of the use of mathematical mean or average. Additionally, sea level data activities can support classroom lessons on ocean density, circulation, tides and global climate change.

More Lessons from the Sky is pleased to spotlight Understanding Sea Level, a lesson set investigating changing sea level in a scaled sequence of five lessons. Learners use NOAA’s on-line interactive Data in the Classroom tool to collect, analyze, and interpret real sea level data from NOAA’s satellites and coastal stations; they apply this information to explore dynamic Earth processes and understand the impact of environmental events on a regional or global scale. The lesson set was originally developed by the NOAA Ocean Data Education Project (NODE) and was fully updated with the launch of the revised NOAA Data in the Classroom on-line data access portal and analysis tool for students. The full suite of curricular resources including complete plans for each of the five scaled and sequential lessons, handouts, worksheets, and Teacher’s Guides are available from the NOAA National Environmental Visualization Laboratory: https://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/StoryMaps/DITC/SLR/SeaLevel_TeachersGuide.pdf.

Next Generation Science Standards addressed in this lesson:
    MS-ESS2-4     MS-ESS3-2