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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Students develop and test a hypothesis about how albedo affects temperature.
Conduct this modified EO Kids mini-lesson with your students to explore the phenomenon of Urban Heat Island Effect.
Students collect and analyze temperature data to explore what governs how much energy is reflected.
Students analyze map visualizations representing the amount of Sun’s energy received on the Earth as indicated by the amount that is reflected back to space, known as “albedo”.
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.
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
In this experiment, students make a claim about the cause of ocean currents and then develop a model to explain the role of salinity and density in deep ocean currents. This lesson is modified from "Visit to an Ocean Planet" Caltech and NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Exploring salinity patterns is a great way to better understand the relationships between the water cycle, ocean circulation, and climate. In this mini lesson, students analyze sea surface salinity mapped plots created from the Earth System Data Explorer, paired with questions (and answers) from the Aquarius Mission. Credit: Aquarius Education
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.