Soil Temperature (DP1.00041.001) algorithm updates
October 19, 2026
Soil Temperature (DP1.00041.001) is being migrated to NEON's new instrument processing pipeline. As part of this migration, provisional data will be generated using 5-minute and 30-minute averaging intervals, replacing the 1-minute and 30-minute averaging intervals used in RELEASE-2026 and earlier.
The change from 1-minute to 5-minute averaging intervals is based on feedback from NEON's Soil Sensor Technical Working Group and other external researchers who found the 1-minute data volume too large to be useful and noted that soil temperature does not typically change appreciably from one minute to the next. This change will create a temporary misalignment between newly generated provisional data (5-minute/30-minute) and previously released data (1-minute/30-minute). Data users who combine provisional and released Soil Temperature data during this period should be aware of this discrepancy in averaging interval.
All Soil Temperature data — both provisional and previously released — will be reprocessed to the 5-minute and 30-minute averaging interval and made available in RELEASE-2027, expected in late January 2027. After RELEASE-2027, the averaging interval will be consistent across the full period of record.
Prior to the publication of RELEASE-2027 data, users downloading both released (includes 1-minute data) and provisional (includes 5-minute data) data will need to use neonUtilities R package version 4.1.0 or later, which is expected to be released in November 2026. Until version 4.1.0 is available, users can avoid this issue by restricting downloads to the 30-minute data (i.e., timeIndex = 30 in the loadByProduct function) or by accessing released and provisional data separately.
