This interactive resource allows students to explore temperatures, climate shift index data, and temperature anomalies across the United States for yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the following day.
Students will be able to work with climate data for specific areas and learn about how climate change is impacting the world.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This interactive map is easy to use and incredibly enlightening.
Because it is so current and meaningful, students will be engaged with the map.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should have a basic understanding of climate change.
There is a link below the map about how Realtime Fingerprints develops tools like climate shift index, which may help students gain a better understanding of the map.
Differentiation
This resource would work equally well in a science or social studies class and would be especially meaningful as a cross-curricular tool between the two classes. Students can choose a region of the country to learn about and use this tool to understand the climate and how the climate is changing there.
This resource would be a great tool for students to revisit throughout the year and record data.
The CSI tool calculates temperature anomalies under a changing climate in U.S. cities. The model also has limitations as it doesn't aggregate other climate drivers like wind, precipitation, RH, etc, but it is useful to illustrate temperature shifts and global warming patterns. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
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 systems.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.2.6-8 Use maps, satellite images, photographs, and other representations to explain relationships between the locations of places and regions, and changes in their environmental characteristics.
