At CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences, more than 800 scientists work to understand the dynamic Earth system, including people’s relationship with the planet. CIRES is a partnership of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado Boulder, and our areas of expertise include weather and climate including impacts to wildfire and water, changes at Earth’s poles, air quality and atmospheric chemistry, water resources, solid Earth sciences and more.
CIRES has been facilitating collaboration between CU Boulder and NOAA since 1967. We support NOAA’s mission by furthering Earth system and other environmental research that crosscuts traditional scientific fields. CIRES helps strengthen the scientific foundation upon which NOAA’s environmental intelligence services depend, and our partnership with the agency allows coordinated studies on a scale that could not be undertaken by the university or NOAA alone.
Visit our website for more information and additional resources welcome | CIRES (colorado.edu)
In this module, students engage in a visual demonstration on the causes & effects of air pollutants on air quality and kinesthetic activities on particulate matter & visibility.
Having students follow animal tracks (even just people, dogs, or squirrels) and investigating how tracks are made is a fun and exciting way to develop critical thinking, measurement, and graphing skills.
In this lesson, students explore the importance of albedo (or reflectivity) to penguins and the surfaces they inhabit and learn how penguin colonies may be mapped using satellites.
In this middle school and high school unit, students engage with 360° virtual reality tours, authentic Arctic datasets, and app-based labs to construct models and explanations for the unit driving question, "Why might the Arctic be warming twice as fast as the rest of the world?"
In this lesson, students investigate whether other parts of the world are changing and getting hotter just like Colorado.
During this module, students take a virtual mobile lab drive with scientists to investigate and learn about atmospheric carbon gases, their sources, and impacts on air quality.
Humans have been affected by severe drought throughout history; in this lesson students explore this concept by analyzing environmental data to classify patterns and practice communicating their findings.
Students build an understanding of flooding in Colorado using multiple data sources in a jigsaw format.
Wildfires are occurring more frequently and increasing in size in the western US; in this lesson students will explore this concept by analyzing environmental data to find patterns and practice communicating their findings.
In this sub-unit, students will learn more about their community’s resilience plans, choose a specific topic to focus on, and develop a product to communicate the plan to their peers and/or their community.
The Community Resilience Expo is a culminating event for the HEART Force curriculum, where students will develop and present original ideas to increase resilience in their community.
In this lesson, students create a compass and apply their reasoning about magnetism to how compasses work to help us navigate around the globe while utilizing the Earth’s magnetic field.
The DISCOVER-AQ curriculum integrates real-word research with real-life learning to answer the question: What are the causes and effects of air quality issues and how do they affect human health and the environment?
In this lesson, students measure and compare the rate of a falling object (a penny) at different heights to learn about statistical error.
In this lesson, students will work in small groups to develop an idea to increase community resilience, utilizing Design Thinking.
This jigsaw activity introduces students with Arctic weather data using a role-playing activity that has students read and interpret graphs while considering the optimal time to plan a research mission to the Arctic.
This is a streamlined lesson for students to prepare for a Community Resilience Expo, focusing on drought.
In this lesson, students identify the sun as the source of energy and understand how energy flows through an ecosystem.
In this lesson, students create a vision for the future of their community and identify what resources are most important to them as a starting point for resilience planning.
In this activity, students use authentic Arctic climate data to explore albedo and its relationship to seasonal snowmelt as a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, which is then applied to large scale global climate change.