This interactive resource allows students to explore the number of summer days with above normal temperatures for many American cities between 1970 and 2021.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This resource is an excellent visual on increasing temperatures across America.
Each chart is available in English or Spanish and can be downloaded.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be comfortable reading line graphs.
Background knowledge of normal temperatures would be helpful for student understanding.
Differentiation
Cross-curricular connections can be made in social studies classes discussing geography and climate, health classes thinking about staying healthy on hot days, or math classes working with real-life graphs.
This resource would work well for making predictions about the future. Based on the increase in above normal days in the past 50 years, how many more above normal days can be expected in the next 10, 25, or 50 years?
A jigsaw activity would work well for this resource. Assign each student 2-3 states to review. Then, have students aggregate the data they reviewed and share their findings with the class; this can be done by speaking, writing, or recording.
Scientist Notes
The resource shows summer days above normal values in US cities from 1970-2021. Over 94% of 246 US cities are now experiencing temperature anomalies during summer periods. This resource is insightful and recommended for teaching.
Standards
Science and Engineering
ESS2: Earth’s Systems
HS-ESS2-2 Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth’s surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems.
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-4 Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth’s systems.
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
HS-ESS3-5 Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth’s systems.
