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.
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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.
To help students articulate and integrate their existing knowledge about the air, water, soil, and living things by viewing them as interacting parts of a system
Air, Water, Land, & Life: A Global Perspective
Students learn how to estimate the "energy efficiency" of photosynthesis, or the amount of energy that plants absorb for any given location on Earth. This is the ratio of the amount of energy stored to the amount of light energy absorbed and is used to evaluate and model photosynthesis efficiency.
This graphic organizer may be used to help students analyze the processes and components of Earth System phenomena.
Students review a video showing how the ocean is warmed by solar energy. This is the first video of a four-part series on the water cycle, which follows the journey of water from the ocean to the atmosphere, to the land, and back again to the ocean.
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.
In this activity, students will analyze a NASA sea surface height model of El NiƱo for December 27, 2015, and answer questions. Then they will be instructed to create a model of their own made from pudding to reflect the layers of El NiƱo.
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.