climate app
Explore Climate and Planet Habitability
Understanding planetary climate is about more than just Earth. It involves how energy from a star, a planet’s surface, and its atmosphere work together to determine temperature.
With the Climate App, students can experiment with these factors to explore questions like:
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What would Earth be like without an atmosphere?
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How do greenhouse gases warm a planet?
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How does the energy from a star influence planetary temperature?
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Could planets around other stars support life?
By adjusting a few simple parameters, students can model the greenhouse effect, planetary reflectivity, and the energy a planet receives from its star. These factors all influence whether a planet is warm enough for liquid water and potentially life.
Exploring distant systems helps highlight something important about our own planet. Earth’s climate exists within a delicate balance that allows liquid water and life to thrive. While other planets may share some of these features, the combination we see on Earth is rare. Studying planetary climates helps us better understand this balance and why our life-supporting planet is worth preserving.
Try the Climate App
The Climate App is an interactive simulator that models how energy flows through a planet’s climate system.
Students can explore how three key factors influence surface temperature:
Energy from the star (how much energy a planet receives)
Planetary reflectivity (how much light the planet reflects back into space)
Atmospheric infrared opacity (how much heat is trapped by greenhouse gases)
By adjusting these sliders, students can test how different planetary conditions affect climate.
activities
INTRODUCTION TO THE CLIMATE APP
Grades 9 — 12
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Slides
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Hands-on learning
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Activity sheets
THE TRAPPIST-1 SYSTEM
Grades 9 — 12
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Slides
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Hands-on learning
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Activity sheets
Students learn how planetary temperature is influenced by stellar energy, reflectivity, and atmospheric greenhouse gases.
Using data from the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet system, students estimate the surface temperature of each planet and determine which ones might fall within the habitable zone.
classroom-ready presentation
We’ve created ready-to-use slide decks to make sharing these themes with your students easy and engaging. Just download the Google Slides (in whichever format you prefer), then customize anything you’d like so it fits your teaching style and goals.
You’ll also find a brief video interview with app creator Nick Cowan, along with hidden speaker notes to help guide your flow. The guide is there to build your confidence and understanding, while the slides are all about bringing that learning to life in your classroom.
image gallery
Here you can download all our images relevant to these activities to use as you wish. If you're sharing something of your own, please credit Discover the Universe and link back to this webpage.
