Drought Basics

PBS, WGBH Educational Foundation

This PBS Learning Media activity addresses drought basics, including its causes and impacts and ways to assess it, by using media from NOAA and NASA. It defines the types of drought, the impacts, monitoring, and responses to drought. Use this resource to stimulate thinking and questions on the complexity of drought and to identify some variables used in defining drought.

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Notes from our reviewers

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Material includes Teaching Tips and prepared Discussion Questions. Suggested Teaching Tips are sparse, but the material would be a good supplement for a prepared drought lesson. Slideshow has 15 slides with roughly two paragraphs of text per slide. If students are interested in more information about a climate science topic they can explore other resources directly from the homepage.
In this slideshow students learn about five types of drought, their causes, and impacts on the continental USA. Students learn the difference between drought, aridity, and water shortage through text, real-life examples, and figures. Slides include graphs and animations from cited sources that include NASA, USDA, NOAA, and USDMâhowever there is not a link to the original material. Comments from expert scientist: This is a great holistic overview of drought types, causes and impacts. The resource introduces ENSO and includes several scientific plots/visualizations from scientific models but I noticed a few of the images did not include a source.
This resource could be used as a whole group presentation/lecture or assigned as an independent study. The format is good for visual learners, due to its balance of text and images. However, students cannot interact directly with the graphs/figures/maps on each slide beyond clicking to step through the slides and hit play on the embedded videos. This presentation is more powerful when put with other resources in the multimedia series and provides good background for student investigations. Great introduction to drought with natural drivers and cascading efforts. The activity does not list any prerequisite knowledge or skill. Correlations to standards indicated on the website are elaborate and may not accurately reflect standards addressed in the activity.