Urban Heat Islands

This content has been moved. You can find it under Creation of Urban Heat Islands Story Map link.

In this activity, students explore the Urban Heat Island Effect phenomenon by collecting temperatures of different materials with respect to their locations.  This activity was modified from The NASA PUMAS Collection's "What makes cities hot?

In this NASA investigation, "What's Hot at the Mall," students examine how shopping malls change natural environments by examining thermal images gathered by NASA showing an area in Huntsville, Alabama. 

To investigate the different rates of heating and cooling of certain materials on earth in order to understand the heating dynamics that take place in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Examine (daytime) surface temperature and solar radiation received at locations found near similar latitudes using NASA Data.

Students will analyze and interpret graphs to compare the flow of (shortwave) energy from the Sun toward China over the course of a year on cloudy versus clear days. Students will draw a conclusion and support it with evidence.

Students will analyze and interpret maps of the average net atmospheric radiation to compare the flow of energy from the Sun toward Earth in different months and for cloudy versus clear days. Students will draw conclusions and support them with evidence.

Students identify and classify kinds of land cover (such as vegetation, urban areas, water, and bare soil) in Landsat satellite images of Phoenix, Arizona taken in 1984 and 2018.

This lesson walks students through the use of Landsat false-color imagery and identification of different land cover features using these as models. Building from an original GLOBE lesson, this resource features Google Slide and Jamboard to assist in both face-to-face and virtual learning.

This unit plan is published by the NASA Climate Change Research Initiative's (CCRI) Applied Research STEM Curriculum Portfolio.  The CCRI Unit Plan, called “Urban Surface Temperatures and the Urban Heat Island Effects,“ has the purpose to educate students how climate is changing in urban settings