NASA’s new sea level site puts climate change papers, data, and tools online

nasa_displaydataNASA took the wraps off a new website on Monday dedicated to tracking global changes in the sea level. It’s packed full of free online resources that will likely be useful to teachers, the climate-change-curious, and anyone just looking to dig into publicly available data.

The Sea Level Change site is NASA instead of NOAA because the site focuses on space-based observations — though the latter agency’s mark is all over the place as well. There are sections on the history of observing sea level, ice reach, and other climate markers that make for good primers if you’re not up on your oceanography.

You’ll probably have more fun fiddling with the Data Analysis Tool, however. It’s a big world map with a couple layers you can add onto it and animate (looks like SimEarth!). Still a little buggy (it’s in alpha) but worth trying out — students might even learn something from observing sea level height and temperature changing over time. More datasets will be added later, so you might want to hold off on building your lesson plan for now.

There’s also a database of published papers backing up the info on the site — some of which are free to read, but you’ll have to pick through to find out. (Note to NASA: love the site, but an indicator for open access articles would be great.)

The landing page also apprises you of the latest depressing statistics: sea level rising 3.4 millimeters annually, for instance, or Greenland shrinking by 287 gigatons every year. Great job, everybody!

[graphiq id=”gSiFBivjh8p” title=”Global Land and Sea Temperature Anomalies” width=”640″ height=”561″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/gSiFBivjh8p” link=”//www.graphiq.com/wlp/gSiFBivjh8p” link_text=”Global Land and Sea Temperature Anomalies | WeatherDB”]