Going Further

A full set of curriculum materials for students has also been created for FieldScope by Northwestern University and The GLOBE Organization. These materials will be available online in the future. See the other FieldScope projects at: FieldScope: Collaborative Mapping for Education.

Precipitation and other climate data from U.S. weather stations is available as plots or to download in comma-separated variable format (CSV) for the date range 1895 to 2009 at US Historic Climate Network. An earlier version, Rev3, is also available to view the weather station data for temperature or precipitation for the 100 year period 1895-1994 at HCN Rev 3.

Additional curriculum to study the NARR data is available from the Watershed Dynamics project.
Learn more about the Watershed Dynamics projects at http://www.globe.gov/watersheds

You can also try out Investigations II and IV of the Water Availability FieldScope tool. In Investigation II, you can study the different regions in the US and make selections of different amounts of precipitation. In Investigation IV several tables have already been filled so you can look at the seasonality of the data. 

What are the other variables that could influence the water cycle? Groundwater adding/removing water; seasonality of these variables. Some of these questions can be addressed by using Investigation IV. Others would require accessing more data offline.