Soil/ Earth Temperatures

[Terminal Moraine]

Does anyone else regularly record soil or deep earth temperatures? If so it would be interesting to know how deep the soil has become frozen. If you have a good snow cover it's likely the soil won't be frozen to any depth as snow is a great insulator but here, where the snow cover is only thin, the soil has frozen to about 15cm and I've recorded only very modestly low mimima compared to many, although the maxima' have been consistently low too. The current 10cm soil temp' is -0.7c and at 20cm it's 0.5c.

I've been keeping soil temp' records at various depths down to 2mts for about 30 years ( though not that long for the greatest depths ) and have never known the soil to freeze down to 20cm, mainly due to the fact that in the longest and most severe cold spells there has always been deep snow.

[Great Plum]

There is a comment in the model thread that a number of engineers are very worried that the depth of the frozen soil may lead to problems with pipework!

[dave.p]

The 30cm earth temp at the weather station 5 miles from here is 2.2c

[Cymro]

Thanks to that cold spell at the end of november the ground and ponds froze here by the 24th of november and never thawed even durin the less cold spell therefore with the deep snow cover we now have protecting this frozen ground. I would say nothing but a guess that the ground here is frozen a good 15 - 20cm down.

[Terminal Moraine]

The 30cm earth temp at the weather station 5 miles from here is 2.2c

1.9c here at 1800 today. It did reach the same value around Feb' 23rd this year but remarkably low for so early in the season.