Paleoclimate: Climate Change Through Time
This section provides access to a spectrum of visualizations and supporting material that can be used effectively to teach students about paleoclimate through geologic time. Visualizations include simple animations, GIS-based animated maps, paleogeographic maps, as well as numerous illustrations and photos.
Click here to browse the complete set of Visualization Collections.
Paleoclimate Variability and Timescales
- Exploring Weather and Change Through the Powers of Ten: Climate TimeLine Summary (more info) A narrative text with many embedded links to visualizations describes and illustrates aspects of paleoclimate climate. This NOAA site points out the different aspects of paleoclimate change that operate on different timescales.
- Climate Timeline Tool: What is Variability? (more info) . An overview of climate variability from 1010 yr to 10-3 yr time scales that employs mouse rollovers for definitions of specific climate processes. This NOAA site points out the different aspects of the climate system that operate on different time scales.
Paleoclimatic Change
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Paleoclimatology Program (more info) . This site is a clearinghouse of information, data and visualizations from NOAAs Paleoclimatology Program. A number of resources are available here, including:
- Modern and Fossil Pollen Data
- Pollen Viewer. Java animations of vegetation dynamics from 21KYA to modern in North America by Phil Leduc based on a variety of pollen records.
- Paleo Website Java Animations
- Visualizations of Paleoclimate Model data (more info) . Java map animations of paleoclimate model runs from NASA and NCAR for a variety of time coverages.
- WebMapper, a client-sided Geospatial data access tool, provides map-based data discovery to an array of paleoclimate data from the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology.
