Determination of soil temperature in an arid region

The soil temperature is very important in desert surface energy balance study of aid environment. Previous studies, however, reveal that it is difficult to realistically estimate soil temperature in both amplitude and phase. In this paper, a recent approach is tested focusing on a high temporal resolution soil temperature data read from literature. The resulting soil temperature is found to be in satisfactory agreement with direct measurements. Meanwhile, using this approach, we determine the soil thermal diffusivity and the water flux density for four soil layer depths. Results show that both of them change with increasing depth, which means that the soil thermal properties are heterogeneous in vertical column at this site. The results suggest that this approach could be used as a reference soil temperature estimate.