Global climate change and human health impacts: investigation and analysis in the classroom using innovative technologies

Abstract

The objective of the NASA Global Climate Change Education (GCCE) project is to provide educators at the elementary, secondary, and undergraduate levels the tools and resources to access NASA climate information and related Earth system information, in order to engage students in critical thinking about global climate change and the potential impacts on human health across the planet. This project incorporates NASA climate change information and other Earth system information related to human health into NASA World Wind, an open source 3-D visualization tool. World Wind uses OGC-compliant Web Coverage Services (WCS) and Web Map Services (WMS) that allow zooming in from satellite altitude to any location on the Earth's surface. Student lessons will use climate data made available through the enhanced NASA World Wind interface to explore potential impacts on human health in areas of food security, water security, and infectious disease. Two existing Web-based resources, the Climate Mapper tool from IAGT and the Population Estimation Service from SEDAC, will be merged and made available through a customized NASA World Wind interface that will launch from the Web. This merger of two NASA-supported tools will allow the technical component and parametric statistics to be applied to additional climate- and human health-related data sets from CIESIN, such as world population grids, malnutrition levels related to changes in temperature and precipitation that would impact staple food production, population displacement related to rising sea levels, and spatial epidemiology of vector-borne diseases and population access to a public health infrastructure.