Wyomining middle & high school students learned the value of aerial & satellite images for monitoring Earth surface changes

More than 20 Wyoming Middle & high school students learned how data collected by Earth Observation (EO) satellites are used for tracking/monitoring farms, rangelands, forests, wildfires, and floods.

Students from Carey Junior High, CY Middle, Laramie Middle, McCormick Junior High, Cheyenne Central High, Moutain View Middle, Cheyenne South High, Dean Morgan Middle, and Johnson Junior High schools learned about geostationary and polar orbiting satellites and how the data they collect are used for tracking hurricanes, floods, wildfires, crop growth, and forest health.

Students viewing an animation of geostationary satellite in orbit
(Photo: Jeremy Cain, UW Extension)

As a part of this event, students visited one of NASA's websites and wrote their name using Landsat images (samples names generated with Landsat images shown below).

Interested in making an image with your name? Visit NASA's Your Name in Landsat page.

More info on Landsat: Visit USGS' Landsat page.

Satellite images track global vegetation responses to annual changes to amount of sunlight

 8th graders at Laramie Middle School, as part of MS-ESS-1 content, learned how earth’s tilt, its spin and orbit around the sun causes variations in the amount of sunlight throughout the year and how various lifeforms have adapted to these changes (leaf color changes, migration, hibernation, etc.).

In this outreach activity, students learned how the information collected by sensors mounted on stationary towers, planes, and satellites are used for tracking those changes. Satellite images acquired throughout the year showed the seasonal changes to the amount of green up in the northern and southern hemispheres (figure below). Students gathered the amount of sunlight received in Cheyenne, Wyoming and compared it to another city in the Southern Hemisphere.

Courtesy: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

(Public domain)

Jared Krysl and Joshua Peterson, eighth grade science teachers commented “[This activity] helped to solidify the concepts brought up by our standard as it related to the amount of sunlight in a day and the formation of seasons due to the Earth’s tilt.”

This educational outreach activity was conducted on Feb 26 and 27, at Laramie Middle School, WY.