Introduction

Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

This quote is one of the more famous lines attributed to Mark Twain. Whether he said it or not—it is a great line. He also reportedly noted that climate is what we expect, whereas weather is what we get.

What is the difference between weather and climate? What do the oceans have to do with them? Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation. Climate is typically described by the regional patterns of seasonal temperature and precipitation over 30 years. The averages of annual temperature, rainfall, cloud cover, and depth of frost penetration are all typical climate-related statistics. The oceans influence the world’s climate by storing solar energy and distributing it around the planet through currents and atmospheric winds.

Dramatic weather events like hurricanes originate at sea, and long-term conditions such as average daily temperature and rainfall are influenced by the oceans. Other phenomenon, such as El Niño and La Niña are disruptions of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific that have profound consequences for weather around the globe. In other words, weather, climate, and the oceans are intricately linked.

This publication is all about developing your students’ understandings of earth’s oceans and the major effect they have on climate. Understanding and interpreting local weather data and understanding the relationship between weather and climate are important first steps to understanding larger-scale global climate changes. Activities that ask students to collect and analyze local weather data as well as analyze global data can be found in the Lessons and Activities section. Analyzing and interpreting data is a major focus of this publication. Numerous data sets can be found in the Sources for Real Data section. The Background Information section and the article Tomorrow’s Forecast will help reinforce your own content knowledge.

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by Kimberly Lightle

Kimberly Lightle is the director of the NSDL Middle School Portal and has been a science educator for many years. She can be reached at lightle.16@osu.edu.

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Copyright October 2006 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.