Positives

• This resource will help students visualize many data sets easily. 
• The historical data begins in 1979 and the projections go through 2045, so students will get a good idea of how things have changed and where they may be headed. 

Additional Prerequisites

• Students should be familiar with U.S. geography.
• Students who are color blind will need assistance viewing the data.
  

Differentiation

• Health classes can use this resource for lessons discussing heat stroke or other heat-related illnesses and how to avoid them.
• Science classes could use this resource for lessons about biomes, habitats, the effects of extreme heat on plants and animals, the effects of extreme heat and drought on ecosystems, rates of evaporation with changing temperature, where plants and animals may migrate to in the future, protein structure, or denaturing proteins. 
• Math classes could use this resource to show the many ways to represent data. Consider having students graph the data presented in the map or download a data set to work with from one of the resources linked.
  
• This resource would work well for an independent inquiry, where students choose a location or area to investigate over a specified period of time. After their inquiry, students can use their findings to present to their peers.