Diurnal Soil Temperature Effects within the GLOBE® Program Dataset

Abstract

Long-term collection of soil temperature with depth is important when studying climate change. The international program GLOBE R provides an excellent opportunity to collect such data, although currently endorsed temperature collection protocols need to be refined. To enhance data quality, protocol-based methodology and automated data logging, along with other physical data, were used to collect soil temperature to a depth of one meter. Data show that diurnal and shallow variation ceases at around 50 cm depth. Therefore the need to incorporate deeper depths into the current protocols for heat flux calculations is warranted. The manual methodology was also found to give representative data.