This investigation is part of the NASA: Mission Geography Module "What are the causes and consequences of climate change?" that guides students through explorations in climatic variability and evidence for global climate change. 

Diamantino Sforza is a Mechanical Engineer who helps manage providing engineering services to Goddard. Find out why he calls his projects his children and how his background is unique.

Civil engineers design, develop, and construct community projects that serve the general public such as roads, bridges, damns, tunnels, water supply systems, etc. The designs include but are not limited to many fields such as hydraulics, thermodynamics, or nuclear physics.

Students watch a visualization video and answer questions on the potential of increasing megadroughts in the southwest and central United States from 1950-2095 using models created by soil moisture data.

Students analyze diagrams showing the effects of clouds on Earth’s Radiation and answer the questions that follow. This mini lesson is designed to help students analyze the interaction between clouds and Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. 

Dr. Norman Loeb, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is the principal investigator for an experiment called the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES). CERES instruments measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back to space and how much thermal energy is emitted by Earth to space.

This resource helps to identify and access GLOBE protocols and hands-on learning activities that complement the Urban Heat Island Effect phenomenon. 

GLOBE protocols can be used to collect many types of data to examine urban heat islands and their effects on the environment. Students can use the protocols to collect data and share their data with other GLOBE students around the world. Students can also conduct their own investigations and see how their data related to global patterns by using GLOBE and My NASA Data together.

The world's surface air temperature is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural changes in the Earth System—and the enormous body of evidence says it’s humans—thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 

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.

The purpose of this lesson is for students to compare data displays to determine which best answers the driving question. To do this they will evaluate the spread of the data and what the displays show.