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. 

My NASA Data has recently released several new resources, StoryMaps, for use in educational settings.

Students collect and analyze temperature data to explore what governs how much energy is reflected. 

In this activity, students explore the Urban Heat Island Effect phenomenon by collecting temperatures of different materials with respect to their locations.  

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.

Teachers, are you looking for resources to help you engage students in data analysis related to the Urban Heat Island in North America?

Check out the images featuring two science variables related to Urban Heat Islands: Monthly Surface Air Temperature (degrees Celsius) &  Monthly Daytime Skin Temperature (degrees Celsius).

The Earth System Satellite Images help students observe and analyze global Earth and environmental data, understand the relationship among different environmental variables, and explore how the data change seasonally and over longer timescales.  

NASA visualizers take data – numbers, codes – and turn them into animations people can see and quickly understand.

This mini-lesson guides students' observations of soil moisture anomalies (how much the moisture content was above or below the norm) for the continental US in May 2018.

In this activity, students investigate three different soil samples with varying moisture content. They use a soil moisture probe to determine the percentage (by volume) of water in each of the soil samples.