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.
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.
This lesson uses the National Park Service Story Map which displays national parks around the contiguous United States and their standard exceedance ozone concentrations from 2016-2021. Students will explore ozone levels and answer questions.
Several heat domes have occurred over the last few summers and around the world. This lesson provides one example from 2021 in Portland, Oregon, with temperature and ozone data.
Students will analyze images and data from a variety of NASA sensors and satellites depicting the wildfires of northern Canada to understand the state of the atmosphere at the time. Then they will answer a series of questions.
Students observe how air quality changes over time, for a selected location, using data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).