An urban heat island is a phenomenon that is best described when a city experiences much warmer temperatures than in nearby rural areas. The sun’s heat and light reach the city and the country in the same way. The difference in temperature between urban and less-developed rural areas has to do with how well the surfaces in each environment absorb and hold heat.
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Students will synthesize information from maps that show population, concentrations of PM2.5, and PM2.5-attributable mortality across the globe in order to draw conclusions about the relationship between particulate pollution and human health.
Students can interact with NASA data to build a custom visualizations of local, regional, or global plant growth patterns over time, using the Earth System Data Explorer to generate plots of satellite data as they develop models of this phenomenon.
Arctic sea ice is the cap of frozen seawater blanketing most of the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas in wintertime. It follows seasonal patterns of thickening and melting. Students view how the quantity has changed from 1979 through 2018.
For over 20 years, satellite instruments have measured the sea surface height of our ever-changing oceans. This video of images shows the complicated patterns of rising and falling ocean levels across the globe from 1993 to 2015.
Students will make a claim about whether changing albedo contributes to changes in Arctic habitats.