There is at least 18″ of fresh snow in my yard this evening so it feels like a good time to tell you about some educational resources from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder offers some good educational resources related to snow, ice, and environmental science. NSIDC’s education center offers sections dedicated to educating students about glaciers, sea ice, snow, and arctic climatology. Most of the resources in the education center are text-based sequences of articles.

Outside of the education center NSIDC offers a large gallery of Google Earth files that you can use to learn about snow, ice, and climate change around the world. NSIDC offers an image gallery containing images captured from research expeditions around the world as well as satellite imagery. Some of the images from the expeditions are simply amazing.

Applications for EducationThe National Snow and Ice Data Center could be a good resource for students of environmental science. The education center is a good primer on snow, ice, and glaciers, but the real value for me lies in the Google Earth files gallery. Contained in the Google Earth files gallery are tours and time lapse imagery that puts the information found on NSIDC into a visual and geographic context that is easy to understand.