How to Find the Temperature Below Ground

The temperature below ground is one of earth’s most unknown numbers, and yet the temperature below ground affects all of us.

It is an important value in the oil and gas industry, in construction, and in agriculture. The ground temperature is key for geothermal energy, understanding the earth and climate, and it is especially important for those who live on frozen ground known as permafrost.

Currently, the ground’s temperature must be directly measured by expensive equipment. Or it can be estimated from equations that are time-consuming to use, and require soil samples for accurate results.

I know this from first hand-experience as a researcher and consultant in the geothermal industry.  

-Sarah R Nicholson, MASc., CEO Umny Inc.

To solve the mystery of this important number, we built the GTP appThis online tool predicts accurate temperatures below ground, anywhere on earth. It works in deserts, urban areas, forests and farmlands. GTP even works in the arctic.

All that’s needed to get a prediction is the location, the depth below the surface, and the date! 

Most existing models of the ground, are overly simplified. 

Instead, we should appreciate that the ground is a complex medium: its properties vary widely across the world. It is porous, and contains material of liquid, solid, and gas in different compositions. To accurately model the thermal behavior of the ground we need tools that are built to handle this complexity.

Dr. Sylvie Antoun, CSO Umny Inc.

Modeling the soil’s complexity, to represent reality.

With scientific research from around the world, we took each layer of the earth’s energy picture such as: climate information, land-use types, geospatial data, topographical details, and the physical properties of the ground that have an effect. We link these features together to include all the details about the ground in our predictions. GTP is built from a specially designed combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Physics-based algorithms.

Illustration of GTP App
GTP uses real-world data of key environmental details that have never before been included in the estimation of ground temperature – modeling more of the real complexity underground.

We focused on a robust testing process when creating our ground temperature prediction AI.

During testing, we only used real world ground temperature measurements from data sources and geographic areas that the AI had never seen previously.

-Sheldon Frith, CTO Umny Inc

Apart from Antarctica and under large bodies of water, GTP is capable of accurately predicting ground temperature in any soil type.

The quality of our predictions is our number one priority. 

We have run extensive testing with peer reviewed data from around the world, and tracked the difference between experimental measurements and GTP predictions.  In the four global regions, the average difference was between 0.47°C and 1°C.  We share this validation freely on our accuracy and info pages. Here you can download and test it yourself, or send us feedback.

GTP is accurate, fast, and easy to use. Predict the temperature below your next project at groundtemperatures.com

GTP by Umny Inc