In this activity, students explore three indicators of drought are: soil moisture, lack of precipitation, and decreased streamflows. Students investigate each of these parameters develop a sense for the effects of drought on land.
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In this activity, students use satellite images from the NASA Landsat team to quantify changes in glacier cover over time from 1986 to 2018.
How much do you know about the frozen poles of our home planet?
This USGS activity leads students to an understanding of what remote sensing means and how researchers use it to study changes to the Earth’s surface, such as deforestation.
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.
Use the AirNow.gov website to determine current air quality in US locations, as well as other information.
Students move through a series of short activities to explore and evaluate global solar radiation data from NASA satellites. In this process, students make qualitative and quantitative observations about seasonal variations in net energy input to the Earth System.
This story map lesson plan allows students to explore global phytoplankton distribution using chlorophyll concentration data in a 5 E-learning cycle. Students will investigate the processes that allow phytoplankton populations to thrive, as well as how their role in the carbon cycle impacts the other spheres of the Earth System.