A novel transformer-based approach for soil temperature prediction

Soil temperature is one of the most significant parameters that plays a crucial role in glacier energy, dynamics of mass balance, processes of surface hydrological, coaction of glacier-atmosphere, nutrient cycling, ecological stability, the management of soil, water, and field crop. In this work, we introduce a novel approach using transformer models for the purpose of forecasting soil temperature prediction. To the best of our knowledge, the usage of transformer models in this work is the very first attempt to predict soil temperature. Experiments are carried out using six different FLUXNET stations by modeling them with five different transformer models, namely, Vanilla Transformer, Informer, Autoformer, Reformer, and ETSformer. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, experiment results are compared with both deep learning approaches and literature studies. Experiment results show that the utilization of transformer models ensures a significant contribution to the literature, thence determining the new state-of-the-art.