Students will identify and describe the relationship between land cover classification and surface temperature as they relate to the urban heat island effect. Students will also describe patterns between population density and the locations of urban heat islands.
Educational Resources - Search Tool
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.
Students review an animation of monthly average wind speed at 10 meters above the ocean surface for our global ocean to analyze the relationship between winds and ocean surface currents.
The Urban Heat Island Implementation Sequence provides a series of lessons and activities for students to learn about the processes that create differences in surface temperatures, as well as how human activities have led to the creation of urban heat islands.
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.
Air, Water, Land, & Life: A Global Perspective
Students analyze the data and details of a complicated graph by identifying components and data patterns.
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.
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.