This seminar introduces the Climate Toolbox as an educational resource for community college teaching. The web-based toolbox provides interactive maps, graphs, and visualizations that summarize past, present, and projected climate conditions. These tools allow students to work with real geospatial datasets while developing data literacy skills, including interpreting spatial patterns, temporal variability, and long-term climate trends.

Students are also introduced to future climate projections from multiple bias-corrected models. Ensemble visualizations such as boxplots help students engage with key scientific concepts including uncertainty, model agreement, and identifying meaningful signals across a range of projections.

Finally, the toolbox links climate variables to real-world impacts—such as temperature and heat stress, snowpack and water supply, and temperature and precipitation influences on vegetation and wildfire risk—helping students move beyond analyzing datasets to constructing evidence-based stories about climate impacts.

More Information

• The Climate Toolbox:  The Climate Toolbox is an online suite of over 20 web tools which provide climate and hydrology summaries on maps and graphs to inform decision making related to heat stress, drought, agriculture and wildfire danger. 
• Climate Toolbox Activities: There are six activities which use the Climate Toolbox to look at future impacts on a location in the areas of temperature, agriculture, forests, fire danger and streamflow.  

About the Speaker

Katherine is an applied researcher in the Applied Climate Science Lab. She helps to maintain large climate datasets (past observations, forecasts and future projections) and develops web tools to improve the accessibility of climate data. She is a lead developer of the Climate Toolbox, an online suite of over 20 web tools which provide climate and hydrology summaries on maps and graphs to inform decision making related to heat stress, drought, agriculture and wildfire danger. The data and tools she helps develop have been used in National Climate Assessments and in peer-reviewed scientific publications and are used every day by decision makers to monitor the climate. Hegewisch earned an M.S. and PhD from Washington State University.