General Overview
Performance Expectation 3-ESS2-2: Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.
The world is not one climate. Stand in the Amazon rainforest and you will be surrounded by dense vegetation, daily rain, and temperatures that rarely vary more than a few degrees from 27 Celsius year-round. Stand at the same latitude but in the Atacama Desert of Chile and you will be in one of the driest places on Earth, where some weather stations have never recorded measurable rainfall. Travel to the Arctic tundra and you will find landscapes frozen for nine months of the year, with just a brief burst of flowering plants in the short summer. Travel to the Hawaiian Islands and you will find lush windward slopes receiving 300 inches of rain annually within sight of dry leeward beaches receiving fewer than 20 inches. Earth’s climates are extraordinarily diverse, and understanding that diversity is one of the most important foundations for understanding how ecosystems, human civilizations, agriculture, and now climate change operate.
3-ESS2-2 asks students to use information from multiple sources to describe and compare these climates. The science and engineering practice is Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information: students gather facts from books, maps, data tables, photographs, and other reliable media and combine them into a description that is more complete than any single source could provide. The disciplinary core idea is ESS2.D (Weather and Climate): climate describes the range of typical weather conditions in an area and the extent to which those conditions vary over years. The crosscutting concept is Patterns: patterns of climate can be used to describe and compare different regions.
The standard explicitly asks students to combine information, not just collect it. This is a higher-order information literacy skill. A climate description that draws on only a temperature graph is incomplete; one that integrates temperature, precipitation, seasonal variation, and photographs of the resulting landscape is far richer and more scientifically accurate. Teaching students to synthesize across sources rather than simply copy from one is a fundamental research skill that develops throughout the upper elementary grades and deepens through middle and high school.
This standard also sets the stage for students to begin thinking about why climates differ, even though the mechanistic explanation, involving latitude, ocean circulation, prevailing winds, and elevation, is not assessed at Grade 3. Students who have built a strong, evidence-based picture of what different climates are like are well positioned to investigate the causes of those differences in later grades.
Scope and Sequence
In Grade 2, students obtained information from multiple sources to describe where water is found on Earth (2-ESS2-3) and developed models to represent the shapes and kinds of land and water bodies in an area (2-ESS2-2). Both of those standards developed the multi-source information gathering and geographic representation skills that 3-ESS2-2 directly calls on. In Grade 3, 3-ESS2-1 established the formal distinction between weather and climate and developed students’ ability to represent weather data graphically to reveal seasonal patterns. 3-ESS2-2 takes the next step: instead of looking at one city’s climate over time, students compare climates across many different places, building a global picture of climate diversity.
The Grade 3 treatment of climate is descriptive and observational, not mechanistic. Students describe what climates are like in different regions and identify patterns in how climate varies with geographic location, but they are not required to explain why the Amazon gets more rain than the Sahara or why coastal California has a Mediterranean climate while inland areas at the same latitude have a continental climate. Those mechanisms become progressively more accessible and are formally addressed in middle school, when students model how unequal heating and Earth’s rotation create patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation that determine regional climates.
By Grade 5, students use Earth system models to describe how the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere interact. Climate is the result of these interactions, so the climate knowledge built in Grade 3 directly informs the systems thinking of Grade 5. In middle school, students develop quantitative models of climate drivers and analyze historical climate data. In high school, students evaluate evidence for climate change using global datasets and consider the implications of changing climate for living systems and human communities. The descriptive, multi-region climate literacy of Grade 3 is the foundation for all of this progressively sophisticated climate science.
What Students Must Understand
Climate is the long-term pattern of weather conditions typical of a region. It differs from weather, which describes what is happening in the atmosphere on a particular day. Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get. A region’s climate is described by variables including typical temperature ranges across seasons, total annual precipitation and its seasonal distribution, typical wind patterns, and the frequency of extreme weather events. Climate does not change from year to year the way weather does; it represents the statistical average and range of conditions over many years, typically 30 or more.
Different regions of the world have dramatically different climates. A tropical rainforest climate, found near the equator in places like the Amazon basin, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia, features high temperatures year-round, abundant rainfall distributed throughout the year, and high humidity. A desert climate, found in subtropical regions like the Sahara, Arabian Peninsula, and Australian Outback, features high daytime temperatures, very low annual precipitation, and large temperature swings between day and night. A polar climate, found in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, features very cold temperatures year-round, minimal precipitation (falling mostly as snow), and permanent or seasonal ice cover. A temperate climate, found in mid-latitude regions including most of the continental United States, features distinct seasons with warm summers and cold winters, and moderate precipitation distributed across the year. A Mediterranean climate, found in coastal California, the Mediterranean Basin, central Chile, and parts of southern Australia, features hot dry summers and mild wet winters, supporting characteristic vegetation including drought-adapted shrubs and grasses.
Climate varies with geographic location for reasons that students can begin to observe in the data even without fully explaining the mechanisms. Places near the equator are generally warmer than places near the poles. Coastal areas tend to have milder climates, with smaller temperature swings between seasons, than inland areas at the same latitude. Areas on the windward side of mountain ranges receive much more precipitation than areas on the leeward side in a rain shadow effect. High-elevation areas are cooler than nearby low-elevation areas. Students who notice these spatial patterns in climate data are laying the groundwork for the mechanistic explanations they will develop later.
Key vocabulary includes: climate, weather, region, tropical, desert, polar, temperate, Mediterranean, latitude, elevation, precipitation, temperature, humidity, season, pattern, rain shadow, windward, leeward, describe, and compare.
Lesson Ideas and Activities
A multi-source climate research project is the natural centerpiece for this standard. Assign each small group of students a different world climate region: tropical rainforest, desert, polar, temperate, and Mediterranean are the five most common types and are well-supported by accessible sources. Each group uses at least three different provided sources, such as an informational text, a climate data table or graph, and a photograph collection, to build a climate profile for their assigned region. The profile describes typical temperatures in winter and summer, typical annual precipitation, what the landscape looks like, what kinds of plants and animals live there, and what a person visiting the region should expect. Groups present their climate profiles to the class, and a summary chart is built collectively: all five climates compared across the same set of variables. This synthesis activity is exactly what the “obtain and combine information” practice requires.
A climate data comparison investigation directly connects this standard to the data skills developed in 3-ESS2-1. Provide students with climate data tables showing average monthly temperature and precipitation for five cities in different climate zones: perhaps a city in the tropics, one in a desert, one in the Arctic, one in a temperate mid-latitude region, and one in a Mediterranean climate. Students create a bar graph for each city and then lay all five graphs side by side. Ask: what differences do you notice? Which city has the most precipitation? The least? Which has the greatest variation in temperature between summer and winter? Which has very little seasonal variation? Are there any cities that are similar to each other? The comparison of five climate graphs simultaneously, rather than analyzing one graph in isolation, develops the pattern-recognition skill that the crosscutting concept of Patterns requires.
A climate sorting and matching activity uses photographs, climate descriptions, and data summaries as cards that students sort and match. Each photograph shows a landscape characteristic of a particular climate type. Each climate description in text form describes the temperature and precipitation patterns of one climate type without naming it. Each data summary shows the monthly temperature and precipitation profile. Students match each photograph to the correct text description and the correct data summary, using evidence from all three cards to justify their matches. The discussion that arises when students disagree about whether a photograph shows a Mediterranean climate or a dry subtropical climate is productive scientific reasoning about evidence and interpretation.
A latitude and climate investigation invites students to notice the pattern between latitude and typical temperature even before they can explain it. Provide a world map with latitude lines labeled and mark the locations of eight to ten cities with known climates. Ask students to sort the cities from closest to the equator (lowest latitude) to farthest from the equator (highest latitude) and then compare that ordering to the cities’ average annual temperatures. Students discover that cities closer to the equator tend to be warmer, while cities closer to the poles tend to be colder. They also discover interesting exceptions, like highland cities at low latitudes that are surprisingly cool because of their elevation, which introduces the elevation-temperature relationship as an additional pattern to investigate.
A creative writing activity asks students to write a letter to a pen pal in a different climate region describing their local climate and asking questions about the pen pal’s climate. To write this letter effectively, students must draw on their climate knowledge to describe what is typical in their region and must formulate genuine questions about a different climate based on what they know about the range of climate variation on Earth. This ELA-integrated task requires students to use climate vocabulary accurately, to compare and contrast climates, and to recognize that their own local climate is not universal, an important perspective-taking exercise that opens students’ geographic imagination.
A phenology investigation connects climate patterns to the living world and to student’s immediate environment. Phenology is the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, such as the dates when flowers first bloom, when certain migratory birds arrive, when leaves change color, and when the first frost occurs. Have students research phenological data for your region and compare it to phenological data for a region with a dramatically different climate. When do cherry trees bloom in Washington DC versus Fairbanks Alaska versus San Diego? What does the difference tell you about the climate of each place? This investigation makes climate patterns personally relevant and observable rather than abstract, and it introduces the critical connection between climate and living systems that becomes central to ecology in later grades.
Common Student Misconceptions
The most deeply rooted misconception is the conflation of weather and climate described in 3-ESS2-1, which reappears forcefully in the context of 3-ESS2-2. Students often argue that a climate description is wrong because they experienced a contradictory weather event: “The book says the desert is hot, but it snowed in the Sahara last year.” It is critical to address this without dismissing the student’s observation, because rare weather events in atypical climates do occasionally occur. Instead, emphasize that climate describes what is typical and probable over many years, not what is possible on any given day. Snow in the Sahara happens very rarely; the climate data still shows that the Sahara averages fewer than 25 millimeters of precipitation per year, most of which is rain, not snow.
A second misconception is that all places at the same latitude have the same climate. Students who have internalized the latitude-temperature relationship sometimes apply it too rigidly. In fact, the climate of any location depends on multiple interacting factors, including distance from the ocean, prevailing wind patterns, ocean current temperatures, elevation, and the presence of mountain ranges. London (51 degrees north latitude) has mild, rainy winters and cool summers because of the warming effect of the North Atlantic Current. Moscow, at almost the same latitude, has brutally cold winters and warm summers because it is far from any ocean’s moderating influence. Portugal and Montana are at similar latitudes but have radically different climates. Exposing students to these counterexamples early prevents the misconception from solidifying while also building genuine curiosity about what else besides latitude drives climate.
A third misconception is that tropical regions are always hot and dry. Many students have a vague mental image of “tropical” that mixes desert imagery from media with rainforest imagery. The tropics, defined as the zone between 23.5 degrees north and south latitude, actually include some of the wettest places on Earth, including the Amazon Basin, the Congo rainforests, and the Indonesian archipelago. They also include some desert regions, like the Sahel and parts of East Africa, though these are more accurately described as subtropical rather than tropical in the strict sense. Students need to understand that the tropics are defined by their latitude and angle of sunlight, not by their dryness, and that tropical climates are typically warm and often, though not always, wet.
A fourth misconception is that polar regions are completely lifeless. Students may be surprised to learn that polar regions support remarkable ecosystems adapted to extreme cold, including polar bears, Arctic foxes, snowy owls, lemmings, and a diverse community of Arctic and Antarctic marine life. Even the Antarctic continent, the coldest and driest on Earth, hosts significant populations of penguins, seals, and seabirds along its coasts, and its surrounding Southern Ocean is among the most biologically productive on the planet. This misconception can be addressed through photographs and brief informational texts about polar ecosystems while also building the connection between climate and biodiversity that is a central theme of ecology.
A fifth misconception is that climate change is the same thing as weather change. Because this standard explicitly excludes climate change from assessment, teachers must be careful about how they discuss climate variability. Students may hear adults say “the weather is changing” when they mean climate change, or they may hear climate change discussed in terms of specific weather events in a way that confuses the two concepts. The appropriate Grade 3 response is to focus on the descriptive content of the standard: what is the typical climate of different regions? Students who have a solid descriptive foundation in climate will be much better positioned to understand what it means for climate to change, which they will study in depth in middle and high school.
A sixth misconception is that information from a single source is sufficient to describe a climate accurately. Students who have done research for other school projects may be accustomed to finding one good source and stopping there. 3-ESS2-2 explicitly requires combining information from multiple sources, and teaching students why this matters is as important as the climate content itself. A single source may be outdated, incomplete, or focused on a single aspect of climate that does not represent the full picture. A photograph of a desert shows aridity but cannot convey temperature. A temperature graph shows seasonal patterns but cannot convey what the landscape looks like. By requiring students to combine sources, the standard builds authentic information literacy alongside climate science knowledge.
Assessment Questions
What is the difference between weather and climate? Give an example of a weather observation and a climate description for the same location.
Describe the climate of a tropical rainforest region. Include information about typical temperatures, precipitation, and how conditions vary across seasons. What sources would you use to find this information?
Here are three sources about the climate of Iceland: a text description, a monthly temperature and precipitation graph, and a set of photographs. What can you learn from each source that you cannot learn from the others alone? What climate description would you write by combining all three sources?
A student used only one source, a single photograph of a desert landscape, to describe the climate of the Sahara. What is missing from their description? What additional sources should they use, and what information would those sources add?
Look at climate data for these five cities: one near the equator, one at 30 degrees north, one at 45 degrees north, one at 60 degrees north, and one at 75 degrees north. What pattern do you notice in the relationship between latitude and average annual temperature? Are there any cities that do not fit the pattern? What might explain the exception?
Compare the climate of a Mediterranean region, such as coastal California, to the climate of a temperate continental region, such as the Midwest. In which region would you expect more summer rain? Which would have a smaller difference between the hottest and coldest months? Use specific evidence to support your comparisons.
A family is deciding between two vacation destinations in July. One city is at 10 degrees north latitude near a coast. The other is at 45 degrees north latitude in an inland area. Based on what you know about world climate patterns, what weather conditions should they expect at each destination? What sources could they consult to confirm your description?
Why is it not enough to say a region has a “hot climate”? What other information would you need to fully describe a climate, and why does each piece of information matter?