Students will examine a 2014-2015 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event to identify relationships among sea surface height, sea surface temperature, precipitation, and wind vectors.

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.

Students will engage in a collaborative learning routine as they explore slides that show how the development of public transportation infrastructure changed the land in Woodlawn, Maryland. They will make observations of a satellite image and a photo from the ground as well as read background information on the impact of urbanization. 

In this activity, students use satellite images from the NASA Landsat team to quantify changes in glacier cover over time from 1986 to 2018. 

Students synthesize information from My NASA Data maps and texts from the EPA website to determine how levels of criteria pollutants have changed from 2005 to 2021. This research will prepare them to respond to the lesson’s essential questions during a Socratic seminar.

Students explore positive feedback effects of changing albedo from melting Arctic sea ice.

Use the Earth System Data Explorer to analyze data and make a claim about which 2018 eruption was larger, Kilauea, HI or Ambae Island, Vanuatu.