Oceanography: The water cycle, raindrops and climate change

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, STEM clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 Physical Geography and Physics.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Dr Xinan Liu from the University of Maryland, USA. A physical oceanographer engineer, he and his team are investigating the air-sea boundary area - where rain meets the ocean - to understand its impact in climate change.

• This resource also contains an interview with Xinan. If your students (or you) have questions for Xinan, you/they can send them to him online. All you need to do is to go to the article online (see the Futurum link below), scroll down to the end and type in the question(s). Xinan will reply!

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Xinan’s research and challenges them to create their own model of raindrops falling on the sea.

• The PowerPoint reiterates some of the points in the article.

This resource was first published on Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

If you like these free resources – or have suggestions for improvements –, please let us know and leave us some feedback. Thank you!