Students will analyze how surface (skin) temperatures vary across a community and determine what factors contribute to this variation. Students will describe how human activity can affect the local environment.
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Guided by the 5E model, this lesson allows students to work together to uncover how changes in sea ice extent in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are connected to Earth’s energy budget.
This story map lesson plan allows students to explore ocean circulation patterns as they relate to the world's ocean garbage patches using NASA ocean currents data. Students will investigate the forces that contribute to ocean circulation patterns, and how debris, especially plastics, travel from land to the garbage patches.
The activities in this guide will help students understand variations in environmental parameters by examining connections among different phenomena measured on local, regional and global scales.
In this story map students will learn about the different components of the Earth's Energy Budget, where in the Earth System energy is being absorbed and reflected, and how features of the Earth such as clouds, aerosols, and greenhouse gases, can cause variations in the flow of energy into and out of Earth Systems. In the final section, students make a claim as to why the Earth's Energy Budget is currently out of balance and provide evidence to support their reasoning.
Students develop and test a hypothesis about how albedo affects temperature.
Students review Earth System phenomena that are affected by soil moisture. They analyze and evaluate maps of seasonal global surface air temperature and soil moisture data from NASA satellites. Building from their observations, students will select a location in the U.S.