Soil Temperature (DP1.00041.001) algorithm updates

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.

All code used to generate the Soil Temperature data product is open-source and available in the NEONScience/NEON-IS-data-processing GitHub repository.

For more information on this update, please use the NEON Contact Us Form, and reference DP1.00041.001.