This interactive resource allows students to view a color-coded global map showing the likelihood that climate change had an impact on the daily average temperature on a specific date.
Students will be able to see the regions where climate change is most likely affecting temperatures today.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The map is easy to navigate and is simple to interpret.
Students will enjoy looking at the data for dates or locations that are special to them.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should know what the Climate Shift Index measures and know how to read a map.
The "Choose a Date" option allows you to select dates that do not have any data. It appears that their data only goes back about one year.
Differentiation
Cross-curricular connections can be made in health classes that are considering how human health is impacted by rising temperatures around the world.
As a class, use today's data to have a discussion about the data provided and ask them what stands out about the data presented on the map. Are there certain areas that experience more effects but may not be contributing much pollution?
Science and social studies classes can discuss the trends seen during summer months and discuss how higher temperatures in some areas may affect food production or urban communities.
Have students look up a special date in the past year, like their birthday, and then have them share with a peer or the class what they learned from the data presented in the resource for that date.
Have students in geography classes write a paper about three locations on a specific date, comparing and contrasting what it would be like in those places or what they might be doing on that day in those locations.
Scientist Notes
This interactive map depicts temperature anomalies and patterns, taking into account the realities of climate change. Global temperature is increasing, and this is caused by climate change. As indicated in the map, students can easily explore to understand the shift. Again, the information is real-time, although downscaling the model to local scale reduces accuracy of the forecast. This map could only be considered as a reference tool to prepare for impending climate risk at regional and global scales. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS2: Earth's Systems
MS-ESS2-5 Collect data to provide evidence for how the motions and complex interactions of air masses results in changes in weather conditions.
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.
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.3.6-8 Use paper-based and electronic mapping and graphing techniques to represent and analyze spatial patterns of different environmental and cultural characteristics.
