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Smoke in the Valley: Air Sensors and Wood Stoves

Grade 6 earth science: read air sensor data from a mountain valley town, explain how inversions trap wood smoke and judge a stove change-out program.

Grade 6ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-ESS3-3

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Sorting, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students analyze air sensor data to monitor wood smoke pollution in a valley.
Students judge whether a program reduced smoke, taking differences in weather into account.
Students tell apart actions that reduce pollution from actions that only protect people from it.

How to use

Read the passage together and talk about what a temperature inversion is before students answer. Students can work the data questions in pairs, then write the final claim on their own.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-ESS3-3

Design a way to monitor and reduce a human impact on the environment.

Preview

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Smoke in the Valley: Air Sensors and Wood Stoves

Monitor wood smoke in a mountain town and judge what reduces it.

Monitoring the smoke

Read the passage and study the data. Then answer the questions.

Smoke in Larch Hollow

1Larch Hollow is a town of about 4,000 people in a narrow mountain valley. The town and its numbers are made up, but they are based on real mountain towns. About 600 homes heat with wood stoves, and many of the stoves are more than 30 years old. On calm winter evenings, a gray haze often hangs over the rooftops. Sixth grader Teodora Lungu, who has asthma, noticed that she coughs more on those evenings. She and her classmate Osei Brandvold asked the county air quality officer, Mr. Hamid Rostami, how they could find out how much smoke was in the air.

2Wood smoke contains tiny particles called PM2.5. Each one is 2.5 micrometers across or smaller, about 30 times thinner than a human hair. These particles can travel deep into the lungs, and breathing them day after day can make asthma and some heart and lung problems worse. A national health guideline says the average PM2.5 over a whole day should be 35 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m³) or less.

3Valleys can trap smoke. On clear, calm winter nights, the ground loses heat quickly, and cold, heavy air sinks to the valley floor. A layer of warmer air can settle above it. This is called a temperature inversion. The warm layer works like a lid: the cold air near the ground does not rise and mix with the air above. In the morning, sunshine warms the valley floor, and the lid usually breaks up.

4Mr. Rostami lent the club four low-cost air sensors. The students put two on the valley floor, one on a hillside water tank 200 m above the valley floor and one at a ridge trailhead 450 m up, where there are no homes. First, they set one sensor beside the county's official monitor for a week. The low-cost sensor read about 1.5 times as high as the official monitor, so the club divided all of its readings by 1.5. The data on this page are the corrected readings.

5Most homes in Larch Hollow light their stoves between about 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. After the club's first winter of readings, the town started a change-out program. It pays part of the cost when a family replaces an old stove with a newer model that burns more cleanly.