Going Further
Variations
The constant cycling of material through Earth's spheres (the atmosphere, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere) is driven by solar energy. The GLOBE website holds a wealth of environmental data, and most if not all of those data sets show some type of cyclical variation that suggests a connection to the daily and seasonal changes in solar energy. It is the interactions among those variables that give Earth's system its extraordinary complexity.
Nevertheless, some of the patterns and interactions are more straightforward, and you can take advantage of those to further explore Earth's dynamic system.
Some suggestions to explore, using GLOBE data, include examining the following relationships:
- Air Temperature, Soil Temperature, and Water Temperature
- Soil Temperature, Precipitation, and Green-Up
- Air Temperature and Humidity
- Air Temperature, Precipitation, and Bud-Burst
