This interactive resource allows students to explore the change in extremely hot days that cities in the United States have experienced annually from 1970.
Students will learn that, on average, cities in the United States are experiencing many more hot days per year than they were in the past.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This resource is easy to understand, and it makes a striking point about rising temperatures.
Students will enjoy looking at data from nearby cities or cities they would like to go to in the future.
The resource is available in English and Spanish. Students can click "EN" for English or "ES" for Spanish.
Additional Prerequisites
Students can click on the article More Extremely Hot Days, located in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, to read more about the scientists' findings.
Students should be comfortable reading a line graph.
Differentiation
Math or statistics classes could use this resource to discuss how scientists used average temperature data to determine what a really hot day means in different cities.
Health classes could use this resource in a discussion about the importance of staying healthy during extremely hot days.
Students could make predictions before exploring the resource and compare their predictions to the data.
As an extension, students could write a constructed response explaining their predictions, the data, and how and why they differed.
Scientist Notes
This resource depicts extremely hot periods in US cities from 1970-2021. Changing weather patterns with increasing average temperatures in summer months over this period is evidence that the climate is changing and the weather is becoming more extreme. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
Common Core Math Standards (CCSS.MATH)
Functions: Interpreting Functions (9-12)
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSF.IF.B.6 Calculate and interpret the average rate of change of a function (presented symbolically or as a table) over a specified interval. Estimate the rate of change from a graph.
