Activity: Scaling the Atmosphere

  1. Get a piece of butcher paper from your teacher.
  1. Start a little bit up from the bottom of the paper(the shorter edge of the paper) and draw a line to represent the ground. Starting at the left side of the paper, create a temperature scale that ranges from -80°C to 20°C. Use even increments for your scale. This will act as the X-axis of your diagram.
  1. Line up the bottom edge of the ruler with the ground line and make a line along the long edge of the paper every 10 cm. Continue doing this for 120 cm “above ground”. This will represent vertical scale of your Y-axis where 1 cm = 1 km.
  1. Find and label Sea Level (Earth’s surface and 0 km) at the bottom of the Y-axis of your chart. (Sea level will be the first line you drew at the bottom of the chart.)
  1. Each horizontal line you drew represents 10 km above the last. Moving upwards label each line using increments of 10 km. Sea level line will be labeled 0 km, the line just above it will be labeled 10 km, the next 20 km, then 30 km, then 40 km and so on.
  1. If necessary, fold the pages accordion-style into a stack to make it easier and smaller to work with. Make sure your names are on the chart!

The Layers

  1. Use the information from the Atmospheric Layers Table to draw a colored line across the chart (left to right) to indicate the top of each atmospheric layer.

Atmospheric Layer / Lower altitude / Upper altitude / Temperature at lower altitude / Temperature at upper altitude
Troposphere / 0 km / 11 km / 15°C / -60°C
Stratosphere / 11 km / 50 km / -60°C / -3°C
Mesosphere / 50 km / 80 km / -3°C / -75°C
Thermosphere / 80 km / ~500 km (draw up to 120 km) / -75°C / 1000°C (draw up to -10°C)
  1. Label each layer with its name. Label pauses: Tropopause (between the troposphere and the stratosphere), Stratopause, Mesopause, and Thermopause
  1. Draw a line representing the temperature profile of each atmospheric layer using the chart provided. Do this by connecting the temperature values for each altitude, starting at sea level and working up. Label this line.
  1. Without looking anything up, make an educated guess as a group about where the following things occur and label/illustrate them on your poster:
  • The top of Mt. Everest
  • Commercial jets flying at cruising altitude
  • The northern and southern lights (aurora)
  • Clouds
  • Most of Earth’s ozone

Lastly: Sketch your finished poster on the back of this yellow sheet after we go over it in class.