GRACE Teaching Case

NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is a mission to track the movement of water, including ground water and polar ice, from space. A pair of satellites responds to the gravitational pull of these massive stores of water, effectively “weighing” Earth’s shifting water resources. The satellites can detect where water is accumulating and drying up on a grand scale— data that were unavailable before.

These teaching case materials are designed to help students and teachers to analyze GRACE data. Four essays tell the story of the ongoing data collection and analysis of ice-sheet data from Greenland and Antarctica. The materials are designed for sequential use. We suggest using the graphing tool to analyze actual GRACE data between the second and third essay.

To download data and read more about GRACE go to http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/.

For Teachers

For Students