A hands-on climate workshop with GIS
In this essay I share a hands-on workshop with a goal of assisting faculty who wish to teach about climate principles, processes, and events by incorporating spatial and temporal thinking with modern GIS tools and spatial data.
The content for the workshop is here:
https://www.josephkerski.com/a-climate-gis-workshop/
This resource includes:
--fundamentals
--points of discussion
--10 hands-on activities.
--Resources for further exploration.
I have tested and taught this workshop in online and face-to-face settings this year and have refined the materials each time. This material is suitable for undergraduate or graduate students, and the first few activities can be used in secondary schools, as well. Some background with GIS is helpful but not required. All of the activities use web GIS--apps and ArcGIS Online analysis tools. All of the data for the activities is public open source data. About half of the activities require a log in to ArcGIS Online. For deeper dives with ArcGIS Pro, I provide links to tutorials and lessons.
I am not a climate scientist and therefore this workshop does not offer a deep dive into climate modeling: I provide links to these types of resources in the above workshop materials. However, as a geographer and educator, my goal is to empower faculty to teach important topics such as climate with GIS, and by extension, their students to learn climate processes and events. I also hope to encourage students to consider how they can use GIS to understand climate as they journey forward in their careers. Why? Because every career ultimately hinges on climate--from supply chains in business to management of natural resources, from energy to water, and so much more.
I do hope this is useful to many!
--Joseph Kerski
