This is a partially developed activity description. It is included in the collection because it contains ideas useful for teaching even though it is incomplete.
Using Real-World Data to Examine Climate Change Implications for Lake Superior
by Diane Desotelle, MN Sea Grant
Kevin Theissen, University of St. Thomas
Topic: Climate change trends and implications
Course Type: upper level (but might be scaled-down to introductory-level as well)
Learning Goals
Students should be able to do the following:
Overarching goal: Use existing climate data for Lake Superior to hypothesize about and explore the trends of water and air temperature.
1. Access and analyze real-world data from the Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS) website and from other provided datasets.
2. Develop a well-reasoned hypothesis that explains the existing data, and make conclusions about the future trends for both lake and air temperatures.
Description
This exercise should be run over 1.5 lab sessions or could also be done as a combination homework and lab assignment.
- Students work individually on this exercise. In the first session, instructors explain that students will be viewing data sets of Lake Superior temperatures and air temperatures that span the last century and provide a handout that outlines several tasks and associated questions to complete the exercise. Before viewing the data, students must make a prediction:
- How do they expect Lake Superior water and regional air temperatures to change?
- Do they expect lake water and air temperatures to change at similar rates or not and why?
- Students then access the data from associated websites and provided datasets, plot the data in such a way that trends and magnitudes of change can be compared (this will require use of statistical features of Excel such as data smoothing, trendlines, etc.).
- Students compare the results to their predictions.
- Finally, students write 1 to 2 page report that:
- In the second lab
session (roughly half of a lab period), students turn in their
completed reports and make a brief presentation. The exercise concludes
with a group discussion and the presentation of the Jay Austin
explanation for the phenomenon.
a) includes their plotted data,
b) briefly explains how the results differed from their initial predictions,
c) provides a well-reasoned hypothesis that explains the actual observed difference in rates of changing lake and air temperature, and
d) discusses their ideas about implications for the lake in the future.
Assessment
1. Students' written predictions to questions posed in a handout for the exercise.
2. A 1-2 page type-written report with reasoned analysis of tasks described above.
3. A 5 minute oral presentation in which students visually display the data and give their hypothesis about the differing rates of temp change.
References
Requires access to datasets from GLOS and other sources (from Jay Austin, Univ Minn-Duluth)
Austin, J. A. and S. M. Colman (2007), Lake Superior summer water temperatures are increasing more rapidly than regional air temperatures: A positive ice-albedo feedback, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L06604, doi:10.1029/2006GL029021.
Stronger winds over a large lake in response to weakening air-to-lake temperature gradient, Nature Geoscience 2, 855 - 858 (2009). Published online: 15 November 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo693
Austin, Jay, Steve Colman A century of temperature variability in Lake Superior, Limnol. Oceanogr., 53(6), 2008, 2724-2730 | DOI: 10.4319/lo.2008.53.6.2724. Full text available free from this link.
Lake in a Bottle: A Laboratory Demonstration of the Unusual Stability Properties of Freshwater
J.A. Austin, E.B. Voytek, J. Halbur, and M.A. Macuiane. 2011. Oceanography 24(4):136–142, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2011.107.
