EDUCATION: RADIATION BALANCE

Effect of the Sun's Energy on the Ocean and Atmosphere

Note to the Teacher

The motivation for this Web-based interactive module is the feeling of being part of a NASA mission. Students can form research teams that carry out tasks in order to understand and answer the guiding science questions to the project. The module can be used as a lab component while studying radiation and heat transport in the classroom. Students can undertake the mission in teams or individually and at the end, compile their observations and results together into a global view of the earth's radiative budget.

The module emphasizes the following:

Concepts

1. The earth receives energy from the sun and reflects, scatters, absorbs and emits.
2. The Black Body Model: an object that is a perfect absorber and emitter is called a black body. Real bodies approach this but never reach it and are called gray bodies.
3. Energy is conserved.
4. The entire earth should be in radiative balance. What comes in goes out.
5. Parts of the earth are not in radiative balance.
6. There is an annual radiative cycle. This cycle varies with latitude.
7. Energy Flux is the flow of energy in watts/meter2.
8. Annual Flux: The total of monthly fluxes.
9. Net Flux: The overall change in the flux between absorbed and emitted.
10. Annual Mean Net Flux: The average change in the flux over the year.
11. Shortwave radiation: The energy coming to earth in the visible and near infrared portions of the spectrum.
12. Longwave radiation: The energy that the earth emits after absorbing the Sun's radiation.

Processes

1. Radiation
2. Heat Transport

Skills

1. Data Collection
2. Organizing data
3. Graphing data
4. Analyzing data
5. Drawing Conclusions
6. Formulating Hypotheses
7. Using the Internet to get background information

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