Utilizing Data from NOAA´s Observing Systems to Achieve Environmental Literacy

NOAA has recently significantly increased its commitment to promoting environmental literacy by adopting this effort as a strategic crosscutting priority, forming an Office of Education and Sustainable Development, and creating an Education Council. Another of NOAA’s strategic crosscutting priorities is integrating global environmental observations and data management. NOAA possesses a vast array of observing systems that monitor oceanic, atmospheric, and terrestrial parameters. The streaming data from these systems offers broad opportunities to create real-time visualizations of dynamic Earth processes and to capture rare and spectacular events that occur on regional or global geographic scales. Making these visualizations available and understandable by the general public is a tall task. The potential return on investment, however, is large. By enabling the public to observe environmental processes and long-term trends occurring in their “backyards” and demonstrating the link these “backyard” processes have to global processes, we can build an environmentally literate public that makes more informed decisions. Also, it is well known that the general public has a keen interest in rare or spectacular natural events. Significant learning can occur when we can capitalize on the public’s piqued interest about these phenomena. This curiosity-driven quest for information was made dramatically obvious with the Indonesian tsunami in 2004. NOAA’s Education Council realizes the educational potential that observing system data offer and has adopted Earth Observing Systems Education as a top priority.