This resource about hurricanes and climate change includes a lesson plan, student worksheet, podcast, discussion, interactive computer modeling, and a graphing and data analysis exercise.
Students will learn about how hurricanes form, the economic costs of these storms, how climate change is making these storms more extreme, and what some coastal communities are doing to adapt.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The podcast provides a great explanation of the science behind hurricane formation.
The educator guide can help incorporate this topic into many subject areas including science, math, English language arts, and design.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should know how to graph data.
A timestamped transcript accompanies the podcast for offline use.
Differentiation
The economic costs of hurricanes are discussed, which could be used to open a conversation on trade-offs between the costs of climate change and the costs to implement solutions.
To add a more personal component that students could connect to, explore these Youth Climate Stories from Florida, Puerto Rico, and North Carolina.
This resource includes a podcast in which an MIT expert is interviewed and discusses the relationship between tropical cyclones (a.k.a. hurricanes) and our changing climate. The interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean are discussed, and the impact of sea level rise and storm surges on coastal communities is examined. A transcript and educator's guide, along with additional resource links, are provided. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
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-ESS3-2 Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
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.
Common Core English Language Arts Standards (CCSS.ELA)
Reading: Science & Technical Subjects (6-12)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.11-12.9 Synthesize information from a range of sources (e.g., texts, experiments, simulations) into a coherent understanding of a process, phenomenon, or concept, resolving conflicting information when possible.
