Science on a Sphere

From CSDMS
Science on a Sphere

You can now visit your local Science on a Sphere® and be in awe with the damming of the world’s rivers, or see how waves in the Atlantic Ocean developed during Hurricane Sandy. Over the last couple of months, CSDMS has been developing Science on a Sphere (SOS) datasets. The first datasets with lesson material are posted!

We show how dams spread worldwide, with peak development in the 1950’s. We highlight dam building over time for two large river basins, the Mississippi River basin in the USA, and the Yangtze River basin in China.
Another set of animations was developed from the WaveWatch III® data to show wave power and wave height in the global oceans for the year 2012. Two detailed animations highlight waves during hurricane Katrina and Sandy, so high they even wiped out a buoy in the Gulf of Mexico.

Find out whether there is a museum near you that has one of these giant animated globes http://sos.noaa.gov/What_is_SOS/sites.php here.

Even when you find out there is no globe anywhere near, you can go to the Science on a Sphere website and instead just view and download the animations for use in the classroom.

We have a number of additional datasets to work on, and will work with the CSDMS community to contribute a range of movies to the Science on a Sphere repository. It is worth your time to make these, 33 million people see Science On a Sphere® every year! Feel free to contact CSDMS EKT: irina.overeem@colorado.edu

CSDMS developed the following SOS datasets

A Closer Look at El Nino & La Nina

Rivers: Daily Discharge - 2010

Dams and Reservoirs 1800-2010

Dams and Reservoirs of the Mississippi 1800-2010

Dams and Reservoirs of the Yangtze River 1800-2010

Wave Power over 2012

Wave heights during Hurricane Sandy 2012

Wave heights during Hurricane Katrina

Significant wave height over 2012