Estimating soil temperature using neighboring station data via multi-nonlinear regression and artificial neural network models

The aim of this study is to estimate the soil temperatures of a target station using only the soil temperatures of neighboring stations without any consideration of the other variables or parameters related to soil properties. For this aim, the soil temperatures were measured at depths of 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 cm below the earth surface at eight measuring stations in Turkey. Firstly, the multiple nonlinear regression analysis was performed with the “Enter” method to determine the relationship between the values of target station and neighboring stations. Then, the stepwise regression analysis was applied to determine the best independent variables. Finally, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed to estimate the soil temperature of a target station. According to the derived results for the training data set, the mean absolute percentage error and correlation coefficient ranged from 1.45% to 3.11% and from 0.9979 to 0.9986, respectively, while corresponding ranges of 1.685–3.65% and 0.9988–0.9991, respectively, were obtained based on the testing data set. The obtained results show that the developed ANN model provides a simple and accurate prediction to determine the soil temperature. In addition, the missing data at the target station could be determined within a high degree of accuracy.