Students will learn about and describe the different classifications of Air Quality Index and the importance of standards in air quality monitoring. Students will also use scientific evidence and reasoning to support a claim about long-term trends in air quality in the United States.
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Students will review the sources of the six criteria pollutants for which the EPA has established standards for and describe their impacts on human health and the environment.
Students will analyze how air pollution may be transported over time. Students will also differentiate between sources of air pollution and describe how air pollution interacts with the Earth System.
Students will analyze and describe the relationship between air pollution and minority and poverty populations. Students will evaluate environmental problems in relation to social inequalities.
In this activity students will compare different methods for observing the Sun’s corona and make predictions about what they will observe during the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse.
In this activity, students will model the geometry of solar eclipses using quarters to represent the Sun and Moon (not to scale).
In this activity, students will compare the methods scientists use to study the Sun, including drawings made during a total solar eclipse in the 1860’s, modern coronagraphs, and advanced imagery gathered by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
By matching pie charts with dates between 2002 and 2020, students will predict how air quality has changed over the past two decades. They will then use color-coded Air Quality Index signatures to assess the accuracy of their predictions.
In this story map students will learn about what air pollution is, its environmental impact, the standards used to describe air quality as defined by the Clean Air Act, and the Earth System interactions that drive the transport of air pollution.