This story map allows students to explore the urban heat island effect using land surface temperature and vegetation data in a 5 E-learning cycle. Students investigate 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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Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is affected by many processes including fires, deforestation, and plant respiration. Students will evaluate a Landsat image to determine the rate of carbon dioxide sequestration in a particular area.
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.
The El Niño Implementation Sequence provides a series of lessons and activities for students to learn about a condition that sometimes occurs in the Pacific Ocean, but it is so big that it affects weather all over the world.
This mini lesson focuses on Landsat satellite data and how it is used to detect changes in land use. Students will answer questions based off of a NASA Video that features how Landsat data are interpreted in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and gives examples of the effects insects and logging have with land management.
Students observe monthly images of changing vegetation patterns, looking for seasonal changes occurring throughout 2017. These data can be used by students to develop their own models of change.
In this activity, you will use an inexpensive spectrophotometer* to test how light at different visible wavelengths (blue, green, red) is transmitted, or absorbed, through four different colored water samples.
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.
Students identify and classify kinds of land cover (such as vegetation, urban areas, water, and bare soil) in Landsat satellite images of Phoenix, Arizona taken in 1984 and 2018.