Just finished one of my winter break goals. Check out this business on the link… if I can figure out how to tastefully include it here on the post I’ll do that later.
Hourly Soil Profile, Animated
Daily Soil Profile, Animated

Those things should update hourly & daily depending on the flavor. Just under the wire with 11pm approaching. At some point I’ll apply the temperature correction so that when it’s 0 C it’s not showing as 0.2 C or anything. I guess I should also explain the figure. It’s a little Canvas HTML example I did for another project a while back (Canvas HTML I don’t believe works in Internet Explorer but every other browser should be fine).
The data you see there is house temperature data as a function of depth into the soil below our house. The unlabeled y-axis is depth below ground surface basically from 0 to 3 feet and the x-axis is temperature. From -30C to +5C (-22F to +41F) at the moment. The orange vertical line shows the freezing point, 0 C (32F). So, you can see there the strong diurnal cycle of temperature and then as the soil moisture goes through phase change from liquid to solid the temperature at that particular depth hovers at basically freezing until the water has changed to ice. We have fine grained soil at our house (unfortunately!) so not all of the water freezes at 0 C some of it can be unfrozen down to even -3 C or colder. Anyhoo, a side project I’ve been itching to take care of… I guess why do I care is an obvious question. The answer is that I’ve focused on improving the thermal regime of the soils beneath our house to better maintain the integrity of the foundation. This temperature monitoring system allows me to finally keep an eye on it rather than just go on hunches that I’m making things better. Also, this is the start of a several year project. I’m expecting that as the temperature in the ground cools year over year it will be visible in this data set.